The Essential Drucker
By Peter Drucker
HarperBusiness, 2001 - 386 pages

Would you like to read a book from the best management guru out there? - I don’t think I am exaggerating in typing these comments.

Would you like to learn information that will help you see the world from a different perspective?

Would you like to read a book, place it in your office, and get positive comments/feedback from people?

If you answered yes to any or all of the above questions you have to purchase the July 2002 “BetterBiz Book of the Month.”  In my opinion, people who read this book truly have a better understanding of what management is about.  More importantly, if you read this book you will possess a different understanding of business principles and the importance of innovation and entrepreneurial ventures in today's society. 

This book and the author is that good.

The Essential Drucker is a collection of Peter Drucker’s works.  The book is organized to give you an introduction to management and to Mr. Drucker’s 60 years of management writings/teachings. 

Peter Drucker, at around age 90 today, is a distinguished professor at The University of Claremont.  Mr. Drucker has continuously identified critical principles in management, economics, politics, and the world in general. In my opinion, Mr. Drucker is one of the best business consultants / teachers of the 20th century.

The "Essential Drucker" is the best business book I have come across on the philosophy of management.  Drucker clearly illustrates what makes a corporation effective, what makes managers effective and what makes YOU, the employee or business owner, a more effective person.  Jack Welch has praised Drucker as one of the best writers of management he has come across. I enjoyed some Drucker articles in business school and read his most recent book Management Challenges for the 21st Century prior to picking this book up. 

This book is very interesting because it covers such a wide array of topics with over 60 years worth of writings by Mr. Drucker. Here are the sources of the chapters from Mr. Drucker's prior works:

The New Realities, Chapters 1 and 26;

Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, Chapters 2, 3, 5, and 18;

Managing for the Future, Chapters 4 and 19;

Management Challenges for the 21st Century, Chapters 6, 15, 21;

Managing in a Time of Great Change, Chapters 7 and 23;

Practice of Management, Chapter 8;

Frontiers of Management, Chapter 9;

Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Chapters 10-12, 20, and 24;

The Effective Executive, Chapters 13, 14, 16, and 17; and

Post-Capitalist Society, Chapters 22 and 25.

The book is segmented into 3 sections

#1) The individual

#2) Management

#3) Society

Key concepts that are found in the book, in bullets

• The fundamental task of management remains the same: 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. page 4, ch 1.

• Business Enterprises, and public-service institutions as well, exist not for their own sake, but to fulfill a specific social purpose and to satisfy a specific need of a society, a community, or individuals page 14, ch. 2

• The objectives of business:

Marketing, Innovation, Human Resources,Financial Resources, Physical Resources, Productivity, Social Responsibility, Profit Requirement  page 30, ch. 3

• Non-profits are teaching business a new lesson.  They are forging new bonds of community, a new commitment to active citizenship, to social responsibility, to values. page 49, ch. 4

• Management’s concerns and management’s responsibility are everything that affects the performance of the institution and its results whether inside or outside, whether under the institution’s control or totally behind it. page 94, ch 6

• Seventy years ago the time and motion study made traditional cost accounting possible.  Computers have now made activity-based cost accounting possible; without them, it would be practically impossible.  page 111, ch. 7

• Any business must build a true team and weld individuals efforts into a common effort. Business performance therefore requires that each job be directed toward the objective of the whole business. page 112, ch. 8

• As we have known for a long time, people in organizations tend to be influenced by the ways they see others being rewarded. And when rewards go to non-performance, to flattery, or to mere cleverness, the organization will soon decline into nonperformance, flattery or cleverness. page 134-135, ch. 9 on hiring people.

• A business that wants to be able to innovate, wants to have a chance to succeed and prosper in a time of rapid change, has to build entrepreneurial management into its own system.  It has to adopt policies that create throughout the entire organization the desire to innovate and the habits of entrepreneurship and innovation.  To be a successful entrepreneur, the existing business, large or small, has to be managed as an entrepreneurial business. page 143, ch. 10

• Unless a new venture develops into a new business and makes sure of being managed it will not survive no matter how brilliant the entrepreneurial idea. page 144, ch. 11 on new ventures.

• There is very little correlation between a man’s effectiveness and his intelligence, his imagination, or his knowledge.  Brilliant men are often strikingly ineffectual; they fail to realize that the brilliant insight is not by itself achievement. page 192, ch. 13

• The effective person focuses on contribution.  He or she looks up from their work and outward toward goals.  He or she asks "What can I contribute that will significantly affect the performance and the results of the institution I serve?" page 207, ch. 14

• Successful careers are not planned.  They are the careers of people who are prepared for the opportunity because they know their strengths, the way they work, and their values.  For knowing where one belongs makes ordinary people-hardworking, competent, but mediocre otherwise-into outstanding performers. Ch. 15

• Time is the scarcest resource, and unless it is managed, nothing else can be managed.  The analysis of one’s time, moreover, is the only easily accessible and yet systemic way to analyze one’s work and to think through what really matters in it.  page 240, ch. 16

• Effective people don’t try to make a great many decisions.  They concentrate on important ones and they try to make the few important decisions on the highest level of conceptual understanding.  page 241, ch. 17

As always, if you have any comments / feedback you can reach me at dan@betterbizbooks.com  

Sincerely,

Dan Ross