Drucker on Management

Management guru Peter Drucker may not say anything new in his new book Peter Drucker on the Profession of Management--it's a collection of previously published essays--but he reminds managers that much can be learned from what's already been said and done.

Editor Nan Stone of Harvard Business Review press, which published the new book, writes in its introduction that the essays she chose met Drucker's insistence that "any collection we might publish be able to answer the reader's question, Why this book, now?" Stone says the essays will help executives figure out how to keep their enterprises going into the 21st century.

For instance, Drucker writes that the most dominant factor shaping the way managers manage in the coming years will not be economics or technology, but demographics. "The key factor for business will not be the overpopulation of the world, of which we have been warned these last 40 years. It will be the increasing underpopulation of the developed countries--Japan and those in Europe and in North America," Drucker writes.

Executives can extract other nuggets of wisdom from Drucker's writings, including how to choose managers, how to foster innovation, and what corporations (and government) can learn from nonprofit organizations. Drucker has been preaching good management since 1940 to business and government leaders. He has published 13 books and more than 30 articles in the Harvard Business Review.

While Drucker may be guru of all gurus, he is quick to dispel many current management fads. For example, he bemoans "empowerment" as a concept. "It is not a great step forward to take power out at the top and put it in at the bottom," Drucker says. "It's still power. To build achieving organizations, you must replace power with responsibility." He also warns that much management-speak typically is filled with buzzwords and nonsense, when managers should be trying to talk in a language that everyone can understand.

Still, Drucker puts managers, one of the more maligned classes of people in the 1990s, on a pedestal. "In less than 150 years," he writes, "management has transformed the social and economic fabric of the world's developed countries. It has created a global economy and set new rules for countries that would participate in that economy as equals."