A
PeterDrucker was one of the most important management thinkers of the past hundredyears. He wrote about 40 book and thousands of articles and he never rested inhis mission to persuade the world that management matters. “Management is anorgan of institutions … the organ that converts a mob into an organisation, andhuman efforts into performance.” Did he succeed? The range of his influence wasextraordinary. Wherever people grapple with tricky management problems, frombig organizations to small ones, from the public sector to the private, andincreasingly in the voluntary sector, you can find Drucker’s fingerprints.
B
Hisfirst two books – The End of Economic Man (1939) and The Future of IndustrialMan (1942) – had their admirers, including Winston Churchill, but they annoyedacademic critics by ranging so widely over so many different subjects. Still,the second of these books attracted attention with its passionate insistencethat companies had a social dimension as well as an economic purpose. His thirdbook, The Concept of the Corporation, became an instant bestseller and hasremained in print ever since.
C
The twomost interesting arguments in The Concept of the Corporation actually hadlittle to do with the decentralization fad. They were to dominate his work. Thefirst had to do with “empowering” workers. Drucker believed in treating workersas resources rather than just as costs. He was a harsh critic of theassembly-line system of production that then dominated the manufacturing sector– partly because assembly lines moved at the speed of the slowest and partlybecause they failed to engage the creativity of individual workers. The secondargument had to do with the rise of knowledge workers. Drucker argued that theworld is moving from an “economy of goods” to an economy of “knowledge” – andfrom a society dominated by an industrial proletariat to one dominated by brainworkers. He insisted that this had profound implications for both managers andpoliticians. Managers had to stop treating workers like cogs in a huge inhumanmachine and start treating them as brain workers. In turn, politicians had torealise that knowledge, and hence education, was the single most importantresource for any advanced society. Yet Drucker also thought that this economyhad implications for knowledge workers themselves. They had to come to termswith the fact that they were neither “bosses” nor “workers”, but something inbetween: entrepreneurs who had responsibility for developing their mostimportant resource, brainpower, and who also needed to take more control oftheir own careers, including their pension plans.
D
However,there was also a hard side to his work. Drucker was responsible for inventingone of the rational school of management’s most successful products –“management by objectives”. In one of his most substantial works, The Practiceof Management (1954), he emphasised the importance of managers and corporationssetting clear long-term objectives and then translating those long-termobjectives into more immediate goals. He argued that firms should have an elitecorps of general managers, who set these long-term objectives, and then a groupof more specialised managers. For his critics, this was a retreat from hisearlier emphasis on the soft side of management. For Drucker it was allperfectly consistent: if you rely too much on empowerment you risk anarchy,whereas if you rely too much on command-and-control you sacrifice creativity.The trick is for managers to set long- term goals, but then allow theiremployees to work out ways of achieving those goals. If Drucker helped makemanagement a global industry, he also helped push it beyond its business base.He was emphatically a management thinker, not just a business one. He believedthat management is “the defining organ of all modern institutions”, not justcorporations.
E
Thereare three persistent criticisms of Drucker’s work. The first is that he focusedon big organisations rather than small ones. The Concept of the Corporation wasin many ways a fanfare to big organisations. As Drucker said, “We know todaythat in modern industrial production, particularly in modern mass production,the small unit is not only inefficient, it cannot produce at all.” The bookhelped to launch the “big organisation boom” that dominated business thinkingfor the next 20 years. The second criticism is that Drucker’s enthusiasm formanagement by objectives helped to lead the business down a dead end. Theyprefer to allow ideas, including ideas for long-term strategies, to bubble upfrom the bottom and middle of the organisations rather than being imposed fromon high. Thirdly, Drucker is criticised for being a maverick who hasincreasingly been left behind by the increasing rigour of his chosen field.There is no single area of academic management theory that he made his own.
F
There issome truth in the first two arguments. Drucker never wrote anything as good asThe Concept of the Corporation on entrepreneurial start-ups. Drucker’s work onmanagement by objectives sits uneasily with his earlier and later writings onthe importance of knowledge workers and self-directed teams. But the thirdargument is short- sighted and unfair because it ignores Drucker’s pioneeringrole in creating the modern profession of management. He produced one of thefirst systematic studies of a big company. He pioneered the idea that ideas canhelp galvanise companies. The biggest problem with evaluating Drucker’sinfluence is that so many of his ideas have passed into conventional wisdom. Inother words, he is the victim of his own success. His writings on theimportance of knowledge workers and empowerment may sound a little banal today.But they certainly weren’t banal when he first dreamed them up in the 1940s, orwhen they were first put in to practice in the Anglo-Saxon world in the 1980s.Moreover, Drucker continued to produce new ideas up until his 90s. His work onthe management of voluntary organisations remained at the cutting edge.
Questions 27-32
Reading Passage has six paragraphs, A-F
Choose the correct heading for eachparagraph from the list below.
Write the correct number, i-ix, inboxes 27-32 on your answer sheet.
List of Headings
i The popularity and impact ofDrucker’s work
ii Finding fault with Drucker
iii The impact of economicglobalisation
iv Government regulation of business
v Early publications of Drucker’s
vi Drucker’s view of balancedmanagement
vii Drucker’s rejection of big business
viii An appreciation of the pros andcons of Drucker’s work
ix The changing role of the employee
27 Paragraph A
28 Paragraph B
29 Paragraph C
30 Paragraph D
31 Paragraph E
32 Paragraph F
Questions 33-36
Do the following statements agree with theinformation given in Reading Passage 3?
In boxes 33-36 on your answersheet, write
YES if the statement agrees with whatis stated in the passage
NO if the statement counters to what isstated in the passage
NOT GIVEN if there is no relevantinformation given in the passage
33 Drucker believed the employeesshould enjoy the same status as the employers in a company
34 Drucker argued the managers andpoliticians will dominate the economy during a social transition
35 Drucker support that workers are notsimply put themselves just in the employment relationship and should developtheir resources of intelligence voluntarily
36 Drucker’s work on the management isout of date in moderns days
Questions 37-38
Choose TWO letters from A-E.
Write your answers in boxes 37 and 38 onyour answer sheet.
Which TWO of the following aretrue of Drucker’s views?
A. High-rank executives and workers shouldbe put in balanced positions in management practice
B. Young executives should be given chancesto start from low-level jobs
C. More emphasis should be laid on fosteringthe development of the union.
D. Management should facilitate workers withtools of self-appraisal instead of controlling them from the outside force
E. Leaders should go beyond the scope ofmanagement details and strategically establish goals
Questions 39-40
Choose TWO letters from A-E.
Write your answers in boxes 39 and 40 onyour answer sheet.
Which TWO of the following arementioned in the passage as criticisms to Drucker and his views?
A. His lectures focus too much on bigorganisations and ignore the small ones.
B. His lectures are too broad and lack ofbeing precise and accurate about the facts.
C. He put a source of objectives more oncorporate executives but not on average workers.
D. He acted much like a maverick and did notset up his own management groups
E. He was overstating the case for knowledgeworkers when warning business to get prepared.
Answer keys
27 i
28 v
29 ix
30 vi
31 ii
32 viii
33 NOT GIVEN
34 NOT GIVEN
35 YES
36 NO
37 A
38 E
39 A
40 C
