The Discipline of Management
“If you can’t replicate something because you don’t understand it, then it really hasn’t been invented; it’s only been done.”
When I published The Practice of Management, fifty years ago, that book made it possible for people to learn how to manage, something that up until then only few geniuses seemed to be able to do, and nobody could replicate it.
When I came into management, lot of it had come out of the field of engineering. And lot of it had come out of accounting. And some of it came out of psychology. And some more came out of labour relations. Each of those fields was considered separate, and each of them, by itself, was ineffectual. You can’t do carpentry, you know, if you have only saw, or only hammer, or if you have never heard of pair of pliers. It’s when you put all of those tools into one kit that you invent. That’s what I did in large part in The Practice of Management. I made discipline of it.
Action point: Are your management practices ad hoc or systematic?
The Frontiers of Management
Extracted from Peter Drucker’s book The Daily Drucker.
