-Harvard Business Review
"This visionary thinker has a trademark keen insight. He can understand the internal relationship between different forces, and he once again brought us a book that we can't understand. "
-"Library Journal" (Library Journal) Once, the manager of an American company wrote a report to peter drucker, saying that every paper published by Drucker had to be discussed repeatedly by his management team to sum up the lessons that enterprises could learn from it. For management scientists, I'm afraid there is no higher reward than this. Undoubtedly, it is not limited to the above enterprises and their managers. In fact, since the rise of management academic research in the 1940s, Drucker's articles have always been the focus of attention of business circles, especially front-line managers, and also the yardstick for comparative study, so he is also called "the mentor of American company presidents".
From an academic point of view, to achieve the above achievements, we must do the following three things in this major: (1) Ask questions correctly; (2) Put forward practical solutions; ⑶ Keep pace with the times and repeat the first two steps under the background of social progress.
Drucker's own works can almost be called a model to meet the above conditions. Moreover, in the theory and practice of management, this workflow is also strongly advocated by Drucker himself.
For example, after years of rapid growth, large companies often experience sudden stagnation or even recession. Such examples abound in the business world. People's initial reaction is often the rigidity, bureaucracy and even the laziness of employees. Treatment methods include strategic rules, reorganization, team motivation, etc. However, can we make our thinking more divergent?
When analyzing the above problems, Drucker found a new way and put forward his own professional view. An enterprise can grow smoothly for a long time, largely thanks to its unique career theory. It is based on the conscious mission of the enterprise, including the basic assumptions about the market environment and the general means to realize the mission. Successful career theory will promote enterprises to become leaders and leaders in industry development. However, when the professional theory is realized, such enterprises often lose their way and act contrary to the times.
In the 1920s, at & amp； T thinks the mission of his organization is "to make every American family and company have a telephone". Inspired by this mission, the company actively mobilized resources and made great achievements in 30 years. However, when it completed this mission in the 1950s, the company began to fall into crisis, which was neither caused by bureaucracy nor the loss of technical advantages. Although these statements are not groundless, they are not enough to explain the company's setbacks. The key problem is that it failed to adjust and put forward a new career theory, and the company could not adapt to the changed external environment. However, a keen response to changes in the external environment is a prerequisite for the success of any company.
Nowadays, this kind of crisis is also lurking in enterprises like Microsoft, which are at the peak of their careers. We all know that Microsoft's slogan is "Let every office, every family have a computer on the desk", which is taken from AT & amp； The mission that T 50 set for itself 50 years ago. When this goal is approaching rapidly, how Microsoft adjusts its career theory will be a key measure related to the long-term development of enterprises.
On this issue, perhaps another big American enterprise can learn from its choice. GE is the only remaining constituent stock since the release of Dow Jones Industrial Average. Under the leadership of its powerful CEO, Jack Welch, it entered the most successful period in history. However, they are prepared for danger in times of peace, which leads to a new career theory. The whole company is preparing and adjusting for the arrival of the e-commerce era. Welch spared no effort to push his giant enterprise into the era of e-commerce, so he was awarded the nickname "Electronic Jack".
Drucker prescribed two prescriptions for this situation in his paper. The first is to give up voluntarily, and the second is to follow your own customers. Ge's choice coincides with Drucker's theory. Comparing Drucker's paper with Ge's action, it is not difficult for CEOs to realize where their enterprises are at present, and even the workflow can be designed. What Drucker said seems to be the most general situation, but you can promote it to your own business almost without any obstacles and know how to operate it. This is the unique charm of an outstanding management scientist.
It is of course the responsibility of management scientists to pay attention to the general business problems faced by enterprises. However, if management scientists are keen to deal with the unprecedented changes in the external environment of enterprises only from the micro level of enterprise management, rather than from the fundamental changes that have taken place in society and the times, then they can only cultivate managers who solve problems instead of "entrepreneurs" who discover, seize and even create opportunities. This is not Drucker's style. As an "entrepreneur's mentor", this means that he must wear the crown of the prophet on his head, must be highly sensitive to perceive and analyze the new requirements put forward by the changes of the times, and report his findings to the society and the business community as quickly as possible to alert the front-line CEOs and remind them of various crises that enterprises may encounter due to changes in the external environment in the competition. In the past few decades, he has never given up this kind of effort, and his achievements are a lot of works that we are familiar with today, such as Broken Times, The End of Economic Man, The Future of Enterprise Man, The Management of Non-profit Organizations, Managers in the Post-capitalist Era, etc. From the name alone, they are more like sociological documents than management works. These works earned him the title of "capitalist prophet".
Nevertheless, Drucker was a management scientist rather than a sociologist, and his interest in social change was finally implemented at the enterprise level. As we all know, the formulation of knowledge economy and knowledge society originated from Drucker's works (1960s). He used the concept of "knowledge workers" in his thesis, and his analysis of this concept focused on the authorization, information flow and performance evaluation of knowledge workers within the enterprise.
In another article entitled "The Challenge of New Productive Forces", Drucker raised a new question. What is the key to improve productivity under the background of knowledge economy? After reviewing the efforts made in history to improve the efficiency of commodity production and sports, Drucker made a wonderful division between the traditional economy and the era of knowledge economy: the former can be summed up as how to do things correctly, and the latter can be refined into what to do. In traditional economic work, managers have to teach workers how to operate in order to improve efficiency, represented by Taylor's research on the action decomposition of sand-turning workers. However, in the era of knowledge economy, the real test faced by professionally trained knowledge workers (whose professional level has already exceeded the level of managers, so there is no counseling and training) is to decide what they should do.
The key to improve knowledge productivity is to specify the correct work content, rather than telling knowledge workers how to complete the work.
"Doing the right thing" and "doing the right thing" are the differences between the two eras in the field of pure operational language. In this respect, no one does better than Drucker.
As his colleague george harris said, Drucker has always been good at reducing abstract theories to ideas that people can understand in their daily work and life. You will continue to enjoy this kind of thinking when reading Drucker's paper. This is exactly what Drucker wanted. Bacon said that knowledge is power, and Drucker added that shared knowledge is power.
"Mr. Drucker's profound knowledge and profound thoughts not only affected the academic community, but also affected the business community. It can be said that no famous scholar and successful business leader does not learn from him. "
—— Zhao Shuming, Dean of Business School of Nanjing University
"Managers all over the world should thank this man because he devoted his life to clarifying the role of people and organizations in our society. I think peter drucker has done this more effectively than anyone else. "
-Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric
"Of all the management books, Drucker's works have the deepest influence on me."
-Microsoft President Bill Gates
"Drucker is a hero in my heart. His works and thoughts are very clear, and he is unique among people who are crazy about pursuing fashion ideas. "
-Intel Chairman Andy Grove