The Essential Drucker (by Peter Drucker)

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.

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.