A proselytiser for the human side of business
The opposite of a management fad must be an idea that survives, develops and continues to influence businesses long after the thought is first aired. No wonder, then, that Peter Drucker - who died just over a week ago at the age of 95 - rejected the label of "guru" with all its associations of fads and charlatanism. His ideas have continued to inspire managers and business leaders for decades.
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Born in Austria in 1909, Drucker had enjoyed a conventional upper-middle-class upbringing and would ordinarily have been heading for a professional or academic career had Hitler not intervened. In 1937 he left Europe for the US, where he worked initially as a journalist before embarking on his lifelong career in management writing.
He was to write over 30 books on the subject during the next seven decades, and even had another title in the pipeline at the time of his death.
"You ask me how well I think Drucker's ideas have lasted," says Arie de Geus, author of The Living Company. "Frankly, I have always thought of him as being so far ahead that the question is really how long has it taken the rest of us to catch up."
For Mr de Geus, Drucker remained unmistakably Austrian in spite of spending most of his life in the US. "His emphasis on innovation goes back a long way, all the way in fact to Schumpeter [originator of the conceptof capitalism's 'creative destruction']."
The subject of innovation leads directly into someof Drucker's best-known insights. "Innovating organisations spend neither time nor resources on defending yesterday," he wrote. "Systematic abandonment of yesterday alone can free the resources, and especially the scarcest resource of them all, capable people . . . "
And people remained the focus of Drucker's work for over 60 years. (He rejected a career in economics for what he considered its lack of interest in human matters.) Management is essentially a social function, Drucker believed.
It is possible to consider his impact under four headings that derive from that people-centred approach.
Knowledge workers
Drucker was a critic of centralised, dehumanised systems that looked back to F.W. Taylor's "scientific management". He imagined a new kind of work, one that relied more on the intellectual contribution of employees and less on their basic physical capacity.
But while much of Drucker's earlier work had considered the valuable contribution employees could make when they were seen as a resource and not merely a cost, it was not until his 1969 publication, The Age of Discontinuity, that he spoke specifically of the "knowledge worker", a phrase he made his own.
"Though the knowledge worker is not a labourer, and certainly not proletarian, he is not a subordinate in the sense that he can be told what to do; he is paid, on the contrary, for applying his knowledge, exercising his judgment and taking responsible leadership," Drucker wrote.
He had to wait almost 30 years, until the hype-filled days of the "new economy", for the term knowledge worker to achieve popular acceptance. But his description of the modern employee, using more brain than brawn, is now conventional wisdom.
"The phrase has moved into the vernacular, and most companies are probably not using it any more," says Lynda Gratton, professor of management practice at London Business School. "He shifted the focus of companies, and got them to see that value was derived not from goods but from intellectual capital. The concept of the knowledge worker lives on, even if people now have more specific job titles to describe what they do."
In one of his last works, Management Challenges for the 21st Century, Drucker returned to the theme: "The most valuable assets of a 20th century company were its production equipment. The most valuable asset of a 21st century institution, whether business or non-business, will be its knowledge workers and their productivity," he wrote.
Concept of the
corporation
Though an admirer of great corporations, Drucker nonetheless felt that their inherited structures were too often centralised and rigid. This did not play to the talents and abilities that knowledge workers had to offer. Inefficient hierarchies had to be challenged. This idea influenced General Electric's restructuring in the 1950s, but its inspiration had come earlier.
Drucker had spent two years studying the structure of Alfred P. Sloan's General Motors in the 1940s, producing The Concept of the Corporation (1945). In this he foresaw the rise of the flatter, networked organisation, criticising the inefficient conveyor-belt mentality of the car giant.
Sloan was not impressed - Drucker later claimed that any manager found with a copy of his book would be fired - but the author's insights were far ahead of their time.
"Drucker really began the whole conversation about peer groups and about how knowledge and information is shared within an organisation," Prof Gratton says. "If you look at BP's work with its 'peer assist' programmes, or Nokia, which is doing great things in this area, it all goes back to Drucker's original work."
Management by
objectives
Drucker argued that management, at all levels of a business, lost its way when not adhering to a disciplined pursuit of objectives, both in the long and short term. The impact of this simple assertion has been dramatic.
In an interview this month with the Los Angeles Times, Jack Welch, former chief executive of GE, described a moment when a brief conversation with Drucker led him to rethink GE's strategic approach. "Drucker said: 'If you weren't already in this business, would you enter it today? And if not, what are you going to do about it?' Simple, right? But incredibly powerful."
Drucker first wrote of "management by objectives" in his 1954 work The Practice of Management. The phrase stuck. MBO has been perhaps the most influential of all of his ideas. Who has not had to attend a planning meeting and been confronted by a flip-chart with the word "Objectives" written in large letters at the head of the (blank) top sheet?
MBO, perhaps because of being almost universally adopted, has also been the most misunderstood of Drucker's concepts. "It's absolutely embedded in every single organisation," says Prof Gratton, "though now it is probably much more heavily driven by data than Drucker would have wanted."
Criticisms have been made of MBO for many years. In 1970, US psychologist Harry Levinson wrote an article in the Harvard Business Review entitled "Management by Whose Objectives?", in which he argued that MBO failed to take account of employees' motivations.
Gerry Kraines, chief executive of the Levinson Institute, a leadership consultancy, shares some of the objections the founder of his organisation set out 35 years ago. He is particularly concerned about the link between objectives and reward.
"When managers seek to induce certain behaviour by tying compensation to whether or not people have achieved objectives you set up an adversarial relationship," he says. "It's in the employee's interest to commit to something that minimises the return. It induces greed, and encourages employees to 'game' the system."
Dr Kraines sees GE as a good example of a company that initially adopted MBO but then adapted it successfully. "The 'Neutron Jack' phase was a literal response to MBO - be number one or number two in a market or get out of it - but in time [Jack] Welch started looking at how people added value over and above the numbers," he says. "They broadened out from being a Lord of the Flies organisation, having taken MBO as far as it could go.
"I feel tremendous ambivalence about Drucker, because he was a great storyteller, and 80 per cent of what he wrote continues to hold up," Dr Kraines says. "He is the single most important writer on management. He was logical, but not too rigorous."
Create a customer
The Practice of Management also contains this famous Drucker statement: "There is only one valid definition of a business purpose: to create a customer. Markets are not created by God, nature or economic forces, but by businessmen. The want they satisfy may have been felt by the customer before he was offered the means of satisfying it . . . But it was a theoretical want before; only when the action of businessmen makes it an effective demand is there a customer, a market."
"By this he did notmean 'tell a customer what to do'," says Barbara Bund, senior lecturer at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan Schoolof Management. "I often quote Drucker's other remark: 'Businesses are not paid to reform customers,they are paid to satisfycustomers'."
"There should be an explicit customer reason for everything you do," DrBund says. "You can never know enough about your customers - they are unpredictable, difficult and awkward. But you have to keep working at it, improve your'customer pictures', and communicate that internally.
She offers an example: "This is what Tesco [the UK supermarket group] has done so well - putting customers at the heart of what it does. It's a discipline. It's what Drucker was talking about 20 years ago."
以人为本的管理学大师
当
一种思想在首次公之于众后，仍然会长期存在、发展并持续影响企业，这必定是风靡一时的管理思潮的对立面。难怪11月11日逝世、享年95岁的彼得?德鲁克(Peter Drucker)，反对给自己贴上“大师”标签，因为这让人想到狂热和江湖骗术。数十年来，德鲁克的观点一直在启示着经理人和企业领袖。
德鲁克于1909年出生于奥地利，他接受了传统的上流教育，要不是因为希特勒，他通常会进入职业领域或学术领域。1937年，他离开欧洲前往美国，一开始做了记者，然后投入了他的毕生事业――管理学写作。
在此后的70年里，他写了30多本管理学著作，甚至在他辞世时，还有一部著作未完成。
“如果你问我，德鲁克的观点流传得如何，”《长寿公司》(The Living Company)一书的作者阿里?德赫斯(Arie de Geus)说，“坦白说，我一直认为他非常超前，因此真正的问题是，我们要花多久才能赶上他的思想。”
对德赫斯先生而言，德鲁克无疑就是奥地利人，尽管他大部分时光是在美国度过的。“他对创新的强调可以追溯到很早以前，实际上可以追溯到熊彼特(Schumpeter，最早提出了资本主义‘创造性毁灭’的概念)。”
创新的话题直接导致了德鲁克的一些最著名的见解。“创新组织不会花费时间或资源去捍卫昨天，”他写道，“光是系统性地放弃昨天就能够释放资源，尤其是其中最稀缺的资源――人才……”
60多年来，人一直是德鲁克关注的焦点。(他拒绝从事经济学研究，因为他认为经济学缺少对人这方面的兴趣。)德鲁克认为，管理学在本质上是一项社会职能。
根据德鲁克以人为本的做法，可以将其影响归为四类。
知识工人
德鲁克批评集中、非人性的制度，这种制度可以追溯到F?W?泰勒(F.W. Taylor)的“科学管理”理论。德鲁克设想了一种新式工作，它更多依靠员工的才智贡献，而较少依靠他们基本的体力。
虽然德鲁克较早的很多著作认为，将员工视为资源而不仅是成本，员工才能做出有价值的贡献，但直到1969年，他的《不连续的时代》(The Age of Discontinuity)出版，他才明确谈到了“知识工人”这个他自创的短语。
“虽然知识工人不是劳工，当然也不是无产阶级，但他也不是需要听指令的下属，相反，他运用自己的知识、判断，承担领导责任，并因此得到报酬，”德鲁克写道。
德鲁克等了近30年，直到狂热的“新经济”时代到来，知识工人一词才广为人们接受。但他对现代雇员的描绘――更多地使用脑力而非体力，现在已是常理。
“这个短语成了俗语，多数企业也许不再用它了，”伦敦商学院管理学实践教授琳达?格拉顿(Lynda Gratton)说，“他转变了企业的焦点，并让企业明白，价值不是来自商品而是来自知识资本。知识工人的概念仍然存在，即使人们现在有了更具体的职位头衔，来描述他们的工作。”
《21世纪的管理挑战》(Management Challenges for the 21st Century)是德鲁克最后的几本著作之一，他在书中回到了这样一个主题：“20世纪的公司，最有价值的资产是生产设备。而在21世纪，无论商业机构还是非商业机构，最有价值的资产将是知识工人和他们的劳动生产率，”他写道。
公司的概念
尽管德鲁克崇拜伟大的企业，但他仍然认为，这些企业的继承结构通常都过于集中和僵化。这不利于知识工人发挥他们的才干与能力。必须挑战效率低下的等级制度。这种观点影响了通用电气(GE)50年代的重组，但它的灵感出现得更早。
40年代时，德鲁克用了两年时间，研究艾尔弗雷德?P?斯隆(Alfred P. Sloan)所执掌的通用汽车(GM)的结构，写下了《公司的概念》(The Concept of the Corporation，1945年)。在该书中，他预见了更扁平的网络化组织的崛起，还批评了这个汽车巨头低效的传送带心态。
斯隆无动于衷，但德鲁克的思想太超前于他们的时代了。德鲁克后来声称，当时通用汽车任何经理人看他的书都会被解雇。
“确实是德鲁克开始了有关同事群体，以及如何在组织里共享知识与信息的全部探讨，”格拉顿教授说，“如果看看英国石油(BP)在‘同事协助’(peer assist)项目上的工作；或者在这方面做得很棒的诺基亚(Nokia)，德鲁克的原著里都有讨论。”
目标管理
德鲁克主张，在企业的各个层次，如果不严格地坚持追求短期和长期目标，管理将迷失方向。这个简单论断的影响十分巨大。
本月，通用电气前首席执行官杰克?韦尔奇(Jack Welch)在接受《洛杉矶时报》(Los Angeles Times)采访时，讲述了与德鲁克的一次简短对话，这次对话致使他重新思考通用电气的战略方案。“德鲁克说，‘如果你现在没有加入这家公司，你今天会加入吗？如果不会，你会怎么处理？’简单，对吧？却无比有力。”
在1954年出版的著作《管理实践》(The Practice of Management)中，德鲁克首次论述了“目标管理”。这一短语随后流传开来。在他的所有理念中，“目标管理”或许是影响最大的一个。那些参加策划会议的人，又有谁没有见过(空白)页面顶部，用大字母写下“目标”一词的翻页挂图的呢？
几乎到处都采纳了“目标管理”，也许正因为如此，这也是德鲁克被误解最深的管理概念。“这个概念已完全植根于每个组织中，”格拉顿教授表示，“尽管目前它或许更多是受数据驱使，这并非德鲁克当初想看到的。”
对目标管理的批评已有多年。1970年，美国心理学家哈里?莱文森(Harry Levinson)，在《哈佛商业评论》上发表名为《目标管理，从谁的目标着手？》(Management by Whose Objectives?)一文，他在文中认为，目标管理没有考虑员工的动机。
领导力咨询公司Levinson Institute由哈里?莱文森于35年前创立，其首席执行官盖里?克莱恩斯(Gerry Kraines)赞同这位创始人的部分反对意见。他尤其担心目标与奖励之间的联系。
“如果经理人将薪酬与员工是否达标联系起来，并试图以此引导员工的工作，就会产生对立关系，”他说道，“坚持将回报最小化的做法符合员工的利益。那种做法催生贪婪，鼓励员工与制度进行‘博奕’。”
克莱恩斯博士认为，通用电气就是很好的榜样，通用电气一开始采纳了目标管理，但之后成功地改造了它。“‘中子杰克’就是对目标管理的字面回应――要么在市场上数一数二，要么就退出，但当杰克?韦尔奇开始关注员工如何增加价值超越目标时，”他说，“他们就不再是《蝇王》(Lord of the Flies)式的相互倾轧组织了，他们最大限度利用了目标管理。”
“德鲁克让我感到非常矛盾，他故事说得很棒，他写的东西，80%仍然有用，”克莱恩斯博士表示，“他是最重要的管理学作家，他具有逻辑性，但逻辑性却不太强。”
创造顾客
《管理实践》一书中还包含了德鲁克的这句名言：“商业目的只有一个合理的定义：创造顾客。市场不是上帝、大自然或经济力量创造的，而是商人创造的。在商人找到方法满足顾客的需求前，顾客可能已经产生了需求……但之前这只是理论上的需求，只有商人通过行动创造了有效需求，才有顾客，才有市场。”
“关于这一点，他的意思不是‘告诉顾客做什么’，”麻省理工学院斯隆商学院高级讲师芭芭拉?邦德(Barbara Bund)表示，“我经常引用德鲁克的另一句话：‘企业拿了钱不是用来改造顾客的，而是用来满足顾客需求的’。”
“你做的每件事，都应该有明确的顾客因素，”邦德博士表示，“对顾客了解得再多也不为过，顾客善变，很难对付。但你必须坚持不懈地了解顾客，改进你的“顾客图”，而且要在内部传达。
她举了一个例子：“特易购(Tesco，英国超市集团)在这方面就做得非常出色，它做什么都先想着顾客，这是一条纪律，也是德鲁克20年前谈到的东西。”
