My life has been boring nowadays with my hours filled with overtime I have slid into a home-work routine. Social life is technically a zero.
However, thanks to a friend things got a slight turn when she asked me to help her write a paper about Peter Drucker Management. Well how could I say no, I am in dire need of distraction and a break from my back-breaking routine.
I thought like any other management or self-help books I've read it will only range to 200-300 pages with fonts at size 12. To my utter disbelief she gave me a 600 pages book with letter size as small as the text message on my I phone. Good luck to you my dear.
Well sadly, I thought the would be able to tear me away from rendering overtime but my workaholic hormone are spiking at great height I only get to look into the book on Sunday evenings.
Then one day while taking a break I tried to google out Peter Drucker and that is when I found out that he and his ideologies and contributions have paved the way to how we are businesses in the twentieth century exists.
Reading the book helped me reflect on my own management skills. In addition, it was enlightening to know and understand the concept of management. So I wanted to share some excerpt from the book. In honor to the man who at this present moment I am already an avid fan.
MANAGEMENT
The twentieth century has become a society of knowledge and organized institutions in which major social tasks are entrusted to be performed in and through organization and each of them in turn is entrusted to “managers” who practice “management.”
The institution is itself an organ of society and exists only to contribute a needed result to society, the economy, and the individual. Organs, however, are never defined by what they do, let alone by how they do it. They are defined by their contribution. And it is management that enables the institution to contribute.
Management and managers are the specific organ of every institution. They are what holds it together and makes it work. None of our institutions could function without managers.
“Management” denotes both a function and the people who discharge it. It denotes a social position and authority, but also a discipline and a field of study.
The fundamental task of management is: to make people capable of joint performance through common goals, common values, the right structure, and the training and development they need to perform and to respond to change.
On the performance of these institutions, the performance of modern society—if not the very survival of its members—increasingly depends. The performance and the survival of the institution depend on the performance of management.
In less than 150 years, management has transformed the social and economic fabric of the world’s developed countries. It has created a global economy and set new rules for countries that would participate in that economy as equals.
The emergence of management has converted knowledge from social ornament and luxury into the true capital of any economy.
Decentralization, for instance, arose to combine the advantages of bigness and the advantages of smallness within one enterprise.
Every one of these managerial innovations represented the application of knowledge to work—the substitution of system and information for guesswork, brawn, and toil.
After World War II we began to see that management is not business management. It pertains to every human effort that brings together in one organization people of diverse knowledge and skills. It needs to be applied to all social sector institutions, such as hospitals, universities, churches, arts organizations, and social-service agencies, which since World War II have grown faster ihan either business or government. For even though the need to manage volunteers or raise funds may differentiate nonprofit managers from their for-profit peers, many more of their responsibilities are the same—among them defining the right strategy and goals, developing people, measuring performance, and marketing the organization’s services. Management, world-wide, has become the new social function.
Management is a social function, embedded both in a tradition of values, customs, and beliefs, and in governmental and political systems. Management is— and should be—culture-conditioned; in turn, management and managers shape culture and society. Thus, although management is an organized body of knowledge and, as such, applicable everywhere, it is also culture. It is not “value-free” science.
Management is a practice rather than a science. In this, it is comparable to medicine, law, and engineering. It is not knowledge but performance. Furthermore, it is not the application of common sense, or leadership, let alone financial manipulation. Its practice is based both on knowledge and on responsibility.
WHAT IS MANAGEMENT?
Management is about human beings.
Because management deals with the integration of people in a common venture, it is deeply embedded in culture.
Every enterprise requires commitment to common goals and shared values. Management’s first job is to think through, set, and exemplify those objectives,values, and goals.
Management must also enable the enterprise and each of its members to grow and develop as needs and opportunities change. Every enterprise is a learning and teaching institution. Training and development must be built into it on all levels— training and development that never stop.
Every enterprise is composed of people with different skills and knowledge doing many different kinds of work. It must be built on communication and on individual responsibility.
Neither the quantity of output nor the “bottom line” is by itself an adequate measure of theperformance of management and enterprise. Market standing, innovation, productivity, development of people, quality, financial results—all are crucial to an organization’s performance and to its survival.
Finally, the single most important thing to remember about any enterprise is that results exist only on the outside. The result of a business is a satisfied customer.
Management is thus what tradition used to call a liberal art: “liberal” because it deals with the fundamentals of knowledge, self-knowledge, wisdom, and leadership; “art” because it is practice and application.
And yet, the ultimate test of management is performance.
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