Introduction: The Origin And Purpose Of The Essential Drucker
The Essential Drucker is a selection from my sixty years of work and writing on management—see bibliography.
It begins with my book The Future of Industrial Man (1942) and ends (so far at least) with my 1999 book Management Challenges for the 21st Century.
The Essential Drucker has two purposes.
First, it offers, I hope, a coherent and fairly comprehensive Introduction to Management.
But second, it gives an Overview of my works on management and thus answers a question that my editors and I have been asked again and again, Where do I start to read Drucker?
Which of his writings are essential?
Atsuo Ueda, longtime Japanese friend, first conceived The Essential Drucker.
He himself has had a distinguished career in Japanese management.
And having reached the age of sixty, he recently started a second career and became the founder and chief executive officer of a new technical university in Tokyo.
But for thirty years Mr. Ueda has also been my Japanese translator and editor.
He has actually translated many of my books several times as they went into new Japanese editions.
He is thus thoroughly famliar with my work—in fact, he knows it better than I do.
As a result he increasingly got invited to conduct Japanese conferences and seminars on my work and found himself being asked over and over again—especially by younger people, both students and executives at the start of their careers—Where do I start reading Drucker?
This led Mr. Ueda to reread my entire work, to select from it the most pertinent chapters and to abridge them so that they read as if they had originally been written as one cohesive text.
The result was a three volume essential Drucker of fifty-seven chapters—one volume on the management of organizations; one volume on the individual in the society of organizations; one on society in general—which was published in Japan in the summer and fall of 2000 and has met with great success.
It is also being published in Taiwan, mainland China and Korea, and in Argentina, Mexico, and Brazil.
It is Mr. Ueda's text that is being used for the U.S. and U.K. editions of The Essential Drucker.
But these editions not only are less than half the size of Mr. Ueda's original Japanese version twenty-six chapters versus the three-volumes' fifty-seven.
They also have a somewhat different focus.
Cass Canfield Jr. at HarperCollins in the United States—longtime friend and my U.S. editor for over thirty years—also came to the conclusion a few years ago that there was need for an introduction to, and overview of, my sixty years of management writings.
But he—rightly—saw that the U.S. and U.K. (and probably altogether the Western) audience for such a work would be both broader and narrower than the audience for the Japanese venture.
It would be broader because there is in the West a growing number of people who, while not themselves executives, have come to see management as an area of public interest; there are also an increasing number of students in colleges and universities who, while not necessarily management students, see an understanding of management as part of a general education; and, finally, there are a large and rapidly growing number of mid-career managers and professionals who are flocking to advanced-executive programs, both in universities and in their employing organizations.
The focus would, however, also be narrower because these additional audiences need and want less an introduction to, and overview of, Drucker's work than they want a concise, comprehensive, and sharply focused Introduction to Management, and to management alone.
And thus, while using Mr. Ueda's editing and abridging, Cass Canfield Jr. (with my full, indeed my enthusiastic, support) selected and edited the texts from the Japanese three-volume edition into a comprehensive, cohesive, and self-contained introduction to management—both of the management of an enterprise and of the self-management of the individual, whether executive or professional, within an enterprise and altogether in our society of managed organizations.
My readers as well as I owe to both Atsuo Ueda and Cass Canfield Jr. an enormous debt of gratitude. The two put an incredible amount of work and dedication into The Essential Drucker. And the end product is not only the best introduction to one's work any author could possibly have asked for. It is also, I am convinced, a truly unique, cohesive, and self-contained introduction to management, its basic principles and concerns; its problems, challenges, opportunities.
This volume, as said before, is also an overview of my works on management. Readers may therefore want to know where to go in my books to further pursue this or that topic or this or that area of particular interest to them. Here, therefore, are the sources in my books for each of twenty-six chapters of the The Essential Drucker:
Chapter 1 and 26 are excerpted from The New Realities (1988).
Chapters 2, 3, 5, 18 are excerpted from Management, Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1974).
Chapters 4 and 19 are excerpted from Managing for the Future (1992), and were first published in the Harvard Business Review (1989) and in the Wall Street Journal (1988), respectively.
Chapters 6, 15, and 21 are excerpted from Management Challenges for the 21st Century (1999).
Chapters 7 and 23 are excerpted from Management in a Time of Great Change (1995) and were first published in the Harvard Business Review (1994) and in the Atlantic Monthly (1996), respectively.
Chapter 8 was excerpted from The Practice of Management (1954).
Chapter 9 was excerpted from The Frontiers of Management (1986) and was first published in the Harvard Business Review (1985).
Chapters 10, 11, 12, 20, 24 were excerpted from Innovation and Entrepreneurship (1985).
Chapters 13, 14, 16, 17 were excerpted from The Effective Executive (1966).
Chapters 22 and 25 were excerpted from Post-Capitalist Society (1993).
All these books are still in print in the United States and in many other countries.
This one-volume edition of The Essential Drucker does not, however, include any excerpts from five important Management books of mine: The Future of Industrial Man (1942); Concept of the Corporation (1946); Managing for Results (1964; the first book on what is now called "strategy," a term unknown for business forty years ago); Managing in Turbulent Times (1980); Managing the Non-Profit Organization (1990). These are important books and still widely read and used. But their subject matter is more specialized—and in some cases also more technical—than that of the books from which the chapters of the present book were chosen—and thus had to be left out of a work that calls itself Essential.
—Peter F. Drucker
Claremont, California
Spring 2001
Management By Objectives And Self-Control
Any business enterprise must build a true team and weld individual efforts into a common effort.
Each member of the enterprise contributes something different, but they must all contribute toward a common goal.
Their efforts must all pull in the same direction, and their contributions must fit together to produce a whole—without gaps, without friction, without unnecessary duplication of effort.
Business performance therefore requires that each job be directed toward the objectives of the whole business.
And in particular each manager's job must be focused on the success of the whole.
The performance that is expected of the manager must be derived from the performance goals of the business; his results must be measured by the contribution they make to the success of the enterprise.
The manager must know and understand what the business goals demand of him in terms of performance, and his superior must know what contribution to demand and expect of him—and must judge him accordingly.
If these requirements are not met, managers are misdirected.
Their efforts are wasted.
Instead of teamwork, there is friction, frustration, and conflict.
Management by objectives requires major effort and special instruments.
For in the business enterprise, managers are not automatically directed toward a common goal.
Career / life vision guidance from Peter Drucker — extremely, extremely, extremely valuable attention-directing concepts and ideas from a long-term standpoint.
Larger
The Daily Drucker offers more breadth
Peter Drucker: Conceptual Resources
about Peter Drucker — a political social ecologist
Combined outline of Drucker's books — useful for topic searching.
Process: find topic; get Kindle version; word search; dictate notes to voice recognition software (Dragon NS or smart phone); calendarize
Invent Radium or I'll Pull Your Hair by Doris Drucker
Most of the following contain interesting introductions and prefaces with key strategic concepts. Reading through a book's index is a valuable use of time.
Toward tomorrows
Toward unimagined futures
 The End of Economic Man: The Origins of Totalitarianism (1939)
The Future of Industrial Man (1943)
The New Society: The Anatomy of Industrial Order (1950)
Landmarks of Tomorrow (1957)
The Age of Discontinuity (1968)
The New Realities (1988)
Post-Capitalist Society (1993)
Managing in the Next Society (2002); Last section originally published earlier in The Economist (http://economist.com/surveys/displaystory.cfm?story_id=770819)
Comprehensive Management Books
Concept of the Corporation
Practice of Management
Managing for Results
Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices
Innovation and Entrepreneurship
The Essential Drucker (An introduction to management)
Managing the Non-Profit Organization
Management, Revised Edition
Management Cases (Revised Edition)
The Five Most Important Questions You Will Ever Ask About Your Organization
“Time Related” Management Books
Managing in Turbulent Times
The Changing World of The Executive
Frontiers of Management
Managing for the Future
Managing in a Time of Great Change
Management Challenges for the 21st Century
Managing in the Next Society
Individually Aimed Books by Drucker
Managing Oneself
The Effective Executive
The Effective Executive in Action
What Executives Should Remember (a valuable summary of several core concepts)
The Daily Drucker (an introduction to broad range of his thoughts)
The Daily Drucker table of contents worksheet
Drucker on Asia — A Dialogue Between Peter Drucker and Isao Nakauchi
Adventures of a Bystander
Books about Drucker and his ideas
The Definitive Drucker
Inside Drucker's Brain
A Class With Drucker: The Lost Lessons of the World's Greatest Management Teacher
Drucker on Leadership: New Lessons from the Father of Modern Management
The Drucker Lectures: Essential Lessons on Management, Society, and Economy
The Drucker Difference
Drucker Essay Collections
Although written years ago, these essays can be valuable attention directing tools. They can take your brain to places (brain addresses and brain roads) it wouldn't naturally go. What has changed and what is likely to change?
Technology, Management and Society
Men, Ideas & Politics
Toward the Next Economics and Other Essays
The Ecological Vision: Reflections on the American Condition
|
for topics or phrases.