Peter Drucker: from supervision to objectives

Last post about the episode about Peter Drucker in The Handy Guide to the Gurus of Management.

Drucker later elaborated on the setting of objectives in Managing by Results and many have considered this to be his most important contribution to management thinking. He shifted the focus of management actions away from the inputs to the outputs. It was management by results rather than management by supervision.

(...) Management by Objectives can turn into management by targets and quotas, with workers spending more time chasing the numbers than doing the real work. (...) Drucker knew this. The measures had to measure what really mattered. What Drucker wanted was a workplace where workers were trusted to get on with the job without undue supervision, where they knew what was expected of them and were clear about how it would be measured and how they would be rewarded.

Peter Drucker on decentralization

Yet another post about the third episode in The Handy Guide to the Gurus of Management.

He explained, for the first time, how and why decentralization worked. He calculated that 95 per cent of all decisions in General motors at that time were taken by the divisions, leaving only the really big ones for the centre. Drucker was keen on decentralization because of its impact on what he called Human Effort, the motivation it provided to people to work and to learn. Decentralization created small pools where people felt that their contribution mattered. Those small pools also meant that there was space for young executives to make mistakes without threatening the future of the company. They were, he said, farms for growing talent.

Peter Drucker was there before

The third episode in The Handy Guide to the Gurus of Management, is about Peter Drucker. Now it's a nice time to learn a bit more about him, because right now Drucker's Centenial Week is happening: http://www.drucker100.com/, and some life webcasts will be on during this weekend.

I suddenly realized that Keynes and all the brilliant economic students there were interested in the behaviour of commodities, while I was interested in the behaviour of people.