Reading :: Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices
By Peter F. Drucker

I picked up this thick (839pp.) book in a thrift store. Although I have plenty of sticky notes in the margins, I'll write a short review. 

If you've read much Drucker, there aren't too many surprises here. Drucker draws on scholarship, but also many, many case studies, to illustrate his thoughts on the tasks of management, the manager, and top management. Here, I'll just skip around, picking out some quotable principles. 

Early in the book, Drucker argues that management is practice and performance, not science or knowledge (p.17); it is a social function, socially accountable and culturally embedded (p.18). 

Drucker alleges that "Productivity means that balance between all factors of production will give the greatest output for the smallest effort"—not productivity per worker, not productivity per hour of work. Those measures are still grounded in manual labor and "still express the mechanistic fallacy—of which Marx, to the permanent disability of Marxian economics, is the last important dupe—that all human achievement could eventually be measured in units of muscle effort" (p.68). Instead, Drucker argues, greater productivity is achieved by doing away with muscle effort: via "capital equipment, that is, mechanical energy" or via knowledge (p.68).

Skipping forward, Drucker discusses the shift to knowledge work: "A larger and larger proportion of the labor force in all developed countries does not work with its hands, whether as skilled or unskilled workers, but with ideas, concepts, theories. ... The tool of the file clerk is not hammer or sickle, but the alphabet, that is, a high-level abstraction and a symbol rather than a thing" (p.170). Importantly, knowledge workers are only productive via "self-motivation and self-direction" (p.176; cf. p.279). Indeed, he considers the alphabet to be "the most advanced, most perfect example of scientific management" (p.182). 

Of course, there's plenty not to like about this book as well. Drucker, writing in the early 1970s, seems uninterested in the Civil Rights movement except to the extent that it affects management and the labor pool—resulting in many jolts as, for instance, Drucker characterizes "pre-industrial people, whether peasants in developing countries, the former craftsmen in the mills of England in the early years of the Industrial Revolution, or Blacks from the ghettos of the American city today" (p.192). This is, to put it mildly, not a very nuanced understanding of the respective situations and cultural development of the three groups mentioned. 

Should you pick up this book? I mean, if you can get it for a dollar at a thrift store, or if you're a Drucker completist, or if you want to learn a lot about how management was understood in the 1970s, sure. But if you have already read the more popular Drucker books, I think this one won't provide many new insights.