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The Daily Drucker: January

Peter F. Drucker, Source: www.toolshero.com, Access date: Dec.30, 2023
The Daily Drucker: January⁰¹.

First revision: Dec.30, 2023
Last change: Jul.8, 2024
Searched, Gathered, Rearrange, Compiled by Apirak Kanchanakongkha.

	Born	Peter Ferdinand Drucker November 19, 1909 Vienna, Austria-Hungary
	Died	November 11, 2005 (aged 95) Claremont, California, U.S.
	Alma mater	Goethe University at Frankfurt Germany (Ph.D.)
	Occupation (s)	Management consultant, educator, and author
	Awards	Henry Laurence Gantt Medal (1959) Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art, 1^st class (1991) Presidential Medal of Freedom (2002)

1 JANUARY

Integrity in Leadership
The spirit of an organization is created from the top.

The proof of the sincerity and seriousness of a management is uncompromising emphasis on integrity of character. This, above all, has to be symbolized in management's "people" decisions. For it is character through which leadership is exercised; it is character that sets the example and is imitated. Character is not something one can fool people about. The people with whom a person works, and especially subordinates, know in a few weeks whether he or she has integrity or not. They may forgive a person for a great deal: incompetence, ignorance, insecurity, or bad manners. But they will not forgive a lack of integrity in that person. Nor will they forgive higher management for choosing him.

This is particularly true of the people at the head of an enterprise. For the spirit of an organization is created from the top. If an organization is great in spirit, it is because the spirit of its top people is great. If it decays, it does so because the top rots; as the proverb has it, "Trees die from the top." No one should ever be appointed to a senior position unless top management is willing to have his or her character serve as the model for subordinates.

ACTION POINT: Evaluate the CEO's and top management's character when considering a job offer. Align yourself with people who have integrity.

Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

2 JANUARY

Identify the Future
The important thing is to identify the "future that has already happened."

Futurists always measure their batting average by counting how many things they predicted that have come true. They never count how many important things come true that they did not predict. Everything a forecaster predicts may come to pass. Yet, he may not have seen the most meaningful of the emergent realities or, worse still, may not have paid attention to them. There is no way to avoid this irrelevancy in forecasting, for the important and distinctive are always the result of changes in values, perception, and goals, that is, in things that one can divine but not forecast.

But the most important work of the executive is to identify the changes that have already happened. The important challenge in society, economics, and politics is to exploit the changes that have already occurred and to use them as opportunities. The important thing is to identify the "future that has already happened" - and to develop a methodology for perceiving and analyzing these changes. A good deal of this methodology is incorporated in my 1985 book Innovation and Entrepreneurship, which shows how one systematically looks to the changes in society, in demographics, in meaning, in science and technology, as opportunities to make the future.

ACTION POINT: Identify the major trends in your market that have already appeared. Write a page on their likely longevity and impact on your life and organization.

The Ecological Vision
The Age of Discontinuity

3 JANUARY

Management Is Indispensable
Whoever makes two blades of grass grow where only one grew before deserves better of mankind than any speculative philosopher or metaphysical system builder.

Management will remain a basic and dominant institution perhaps as long as Western civilization itself survives. For management is not only grounded in the nature of the modern industrial system and in the needs of modern business enterprise, to which an industrial system must entrust its productive resources, both human and material. Management also expresses the basic beliefs of modern Western society. It expresses the belief in the possibility of controlling man's livelihood through the systematic organization of economic resources. It expresses the belief that economic change can be made into the most powerful engine for human betterment and social justice - that, Jonathan Swift first overstated it three hundred years ago, whoever makes two blades of grass grow where only one grew before deserves better of mankind than any speculative philosopher or metaphysical system builder.

Management - which is the organ of society specifically charged with making resources productive, that is, with the responsibility for organized economic advance - therefore reflects the basic spirit of the modern age. It is, in fact, indispensable, and this explains why, once begotten, it grew so fast and with so little opposition.

ACTION POINT: Come up with a few examples of why management, its competence, its integrity, and its performance, is so decisive to the free world.

The Practice of Management

4 JANUARY

Organizational Inertia
All organizations need a discipline that makes them face up to reality.

All organizations need to know that virtually no program or activity will perform effectively for a long time without modification and redesign. Eventually, every activity becomes obsolete. Among organizations that ignore this fact, the worst offender is the government. Indeed, the inability to stop doing anything is the central disease of government and a major reason why government today is sick. Hospitals and universities are only a little better than government in getting rid of yesterday.

Businessmen are just as sentimental about yesterday as bureaucrats. They are just as likely to respond to the failure of a product or program by doubling the efforts invested in it. But they are, fortunately, unable to indulge freely in their predilections. They stand under an objective discipline, the discipline of the market. They have an objective outside measurement, profitability. And so they are forced to slough off the unsuccessful and unproductive sooner or later. In order organizations - government, hospitals, the military, and so on - economics is only a restraint.

All organizations must be capable of change of change. we need concepts and measurements that give to other kinds of organizations what the market test and profitability yardstick give to business. Those tests and yardsticks will be quite different.

ACTION POINT: Make sure your nonprofit organization has rigorous tests and yardsticks to measure performance.

The Age of Discontinuity

5 JANUARY

Abandonment
There is nothing as difficult and as expensive, but also nothing as futile, as trying to keep a corpse from stinking.

Effective executives know that they have to get many things done effectively. Therefore, they concentrate. The first rule for the concentration of executive efforts is to slough off the past that has ceased to be productive. The first-class resources, especially those scarce resources of human strength, are immediately pulled out and put to work on the opportunities of tomorrow. If leaders are unable to slough off yesterday, to abandon yesterday, they simply will not be able to create tomorrow.

Without systematic and purposeful abandonment, an organization will be overtaken by events. It will squander its best resources on things it should never have been doing or should no longer do. As a result, it will lack the resources, especially capable people, needed to exploit the opportunities that arise. Far too few businesses are willing to slough off yesterday, and as a result, far too few have resources available for tomorrow.

ACTION POINT: Stop squandering resources on obsolete businesses and free up your capable people to take advantage of new opportunities.

The Effective Executive
Managing in Turbulent Times
Managing in a Time of Great Change
Management Challenges for the 21st Century

6 JANUARY

Practice of Abandonment
If we did not do this already, would we go into it now?

The question has to be asked - and asked seriously - "If we did not do this already, would we, knowing what we know, go into it now?" If the answer is no, the reaction must be, "What do we do now?"

In three cases, the right action is always outright abandonment. Abandonment is the right action if a product, service, market, or process "still has a few years of life." It is these dying products, services, or processes that always demand the greatest care and the greatest efforts. They tie down the most productive and ablest people. But equally, a product, service, market, or process should be abandoned if the only argument for keeping it is "It is fully written off." For management purposes, there are no "cost-less assets." There are only "sunk costs." The third case where abandonment is the right policy - and the most important one - is the one where, for the sake of maintaining the old or declining product, service, market, or process, the new and growing product, service, or process is being stunted or neglected.

ACTION POINT: Ask the questions above, and if the answer is no, make the tough choice to abandon a cherished business.

Management Challenges for the 21st Century

7 JANUARY

Knowledge Workers: Asset Not Cost
Management's duty is to preserve the assets of the institution in its care.

Knowledge workers own the means of production. It is the knowledge between their ears. And it is a totally portable and enormous capital asset. Because knowledge workers own their means of production, they are mobile. Manual workers need the job much more than the job needs them. It may still not be true for all knowledge workers that the organization needs them more than they need the organization. But for most of them, it is a symbiotic relationship in which the two need each other in equal measure.

Management's duty is to preserve the assets of the institution in its care. What does this mean when the knowledge of the individual knowledge worker becomes an asset and, in more and more cases, the main asset of an institution? What does this mean for personnel policy? What is needed to attract and hold the highest-producing knowledge workers? What is needed to increase their productivity and to convert their increased productivity into performance capacity for the organization?

ACTION POINT: Attract and hold the highest-producing knowledge workers by treating them and their knowledge as the organization's most valuable assets.

Management Challenges for the 21st Century

8 JANUARY

Autonomy in Knowledge Work
Knowledge work requires both autonomy and accountability.

Demanding of knowledge workers that they define their own task and its results is necessary because knowledge workers must be autonomous. As knowledge varies among different people, even in the same field, each knowledge worker carries his or her own unique set of knowledge. With this specialized, unique knowledge, each worker should know more about his or her specific area than anyone else in the organization. Indeed, knowledge workers must know more about their areas than anyone else; they are paid to be knowledgeable in their fields. What this means is that once each knowledge worker has defined his or her own task and once the work has been appropriately restructured, each worker should be expected to work out his or her own course and to take responsibility for it. and then to submit them. What am I going to focus on? What results can be expected for which I should be held accountable? By what deadline? Knowledge work requires both autonomy and accountability.

ACTION POINT: Write a work plan that includes your focus, desired results, and deadline. Submit it to your boss.

Management Challenges for the 21st Century
Knowledge Worker Productivity (Corpedia Online Program)

Source: www.amazon.com, Access date: Jan.13, 2024.

9 JANUARY

The New Corporation's Persona
In the next Society's corporation, top management will be the company.
Everything else can be outsourced.

Increasingly, in the Next Society's corporation, top management will, in fact, be the company. This top management's responsibilities will cover the entire organization's direction, planning, strategy, values, and principles; its structure and relationships between its various members; its alliances, partnerships, and joint ventures; and its research, design, and innovation.
Establishing a new corporate persona calls for a change in the corporation's values. And that may well be the most important task for top management. In the half century after the Second World War, the Business corporation has brilliantly proven itself as an economic organization, as a creator of wealth and jobs. In the Next Society, the biggest challenge for the large company, and especially for the multinational maybe its social legitimacy - its values, its mission, its vision. Everything else can be outsourced.

ACTION POINT: Focus on your organization's values, mission, and vision, and consider outsourcing everything else.

Managing in the Next Society
The Next Society (Corpedia Online Program)

10 JANUARY

Management as the Alternative to Tyranny
The alternative to autonomous institutions that function and perform is not freedom. It is totalitarian tyranny.

If the institutions of our pluralist society of institutions do not perform in responsible autonomy, we will not have individualism and a society in which there is a chance for people to fulfill themselves. We will, instead, impose on ourselves complete regimentation in which no one will be allowed autonomy. We will have Stalinism rather than participatory democracy, let alone the joyful spontaneity of doing one's own thing. Tyranny is the only alternative to strong, performing, autonomous institutions.

Tyranny substitutes one absolute boss for the pluralism of competing institutions. It substitutes terror for responsibility. It does indeed do away with the institutions, but only by submerging all of them in the one all-embracing bureaucracy of the apparat. It does produce goods and services, though only fitfully, wastefully, at a low level, and an enormous cost in suffering, humiliation, and frustration. To make our institutions perform responsibly, autonomously, and on a high level of achievement is thus the only safeguard of freedom, and on a high level of achievement is thus the only safeguard of freedom and dignity in the pluralist society of institutions. Performing, responsible management is the alternative to tyranny and our only protection against it.

ACTION POINT: What steps can you and others take now to improve the performance of the institution for which you are responsible?

Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

11 JANUARY

Management and Theology
Management always deals with the nature of man,
and with Good and Evil.

Management always lives, works, and practices in and for an institution, which is a human community held together by a bond: the work bond. And precisely because the object of management is a human community held together by the work bond for a common purpose, management always deals with the nature of Man and (as all of us with any practical experience have learned) with Good and Evil, as well. I have learned more theology as a practicing management consultant than when I taught religion.

ACTION POINT: Do you have any colleagues who are truly evil? Is there anything you can do about it?

"Teaching the Work of Management," New Management

12 JANUARY

Practice Comes First
Decision makers need to factor into their present decisions the
"future that has already happened."

Decision makers - in government, in the universities, in business, in the labor unions, in churches - need to factor into their present decisions the future that has already happened. For this, they need to know what events have already occurred that do not fit into their present-day assumptions, and thereby create new realities.

Intellectuals and scholars tend to believe that ideas come first, which then lead to new political, social, economic, psychological realities. This does happen, but it is the exception. As a rule, theory does not precede practice. Its role is to structure and codify already proven practice. Its role is to convert the isolated and "atypical" from exception to "rule" and "system," and therefore into something that can be learned and taught and, above all, into something that can be generally applied.

ACTION POINT: Are the premises that you base your decisions on obsolete? Do you need a new intellectual framework to win in the market as it exists today?

The New Realities

13 JANUARY

Management and the Liberal Art
Management is a liberal art.

Management is what tradition used to call a liberal art - "liberal" because it deals with the fundamentals knowledge, self-kmowledge, wisdom, and leadership; "art" because it deals with practice and application. Managers draw upon all of the knowledges and insights of the humanities and social sciences - on psychology and philosophy, on economics and history, on the physical sciences and ethics. But they have to focus this knowledge on effectiveness and results - on healing a sick patient, teaching a student, building a bridge, designing and selling a "user-friendly" software program.

ACTION POINT: What is your plan to develop yourself in the humanities and social sciences? Develop such a plan today.

The New Realities

14 JANUARY

The Management Attitude
The demands for a "managerial attitude" on the part of even the lowliest worker is an innovation.

No part of the productive resources of industry operates at a lower efficiency than the human resources. The few enterprises that have been able to tap this unused reservoir of human ability and attitude have achieved spectacular increases in productivity and output. In the better use of human resources lies the major opportunity for increasing productivity in the great majority of enterprises - so that the management of people should be the first and foremost concern of operating managements, rather than the management of things and techniques, on which attention has been focused so far.

We also know what makes for the efficiency and productivity of the human resources of production. It is not primarily skill or pay; it is, first and foremost, an attitude - the one we call the "managerial attitude." By this, we mean an attitude that makes the individual see his job, his work, and his product the way a manager sees them, that is, in relation to the group and the product as a whole.

ACTION POINT: What actions can you take now to impart a sense of managerial responsibility into your workforce?

The New Society

Sources, Vocabularies, & Narratives:
⁰¹. The Daily Drucker: 366 DAYS of INSIGHT and MOTIVATION for GETTING the RIGHT THINGS DONE, Peter F. Drucker with Joseph A. Maciariello, HarperBusiness, 1^st Ed., ISBN 0-06-074244-5, 2004, New York, United States.

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