The Practice of Management
"This classic volume achieves a remarkable width of appeal without sacrificing scientific accuracy or depth of analysis. It is a valuable contribution to the study of business efficiency which should be read by anyone wanting information about the developments and place of management, and it is as relevant today as when it was first written. This is a practical book, written out of many years of experience in working with managements of small, medium and large corporations. It aims to be a management guide, enabling readers to examine their own work and performance, to diagnose their weaknesses and to improve their own effectiveness as well as the results of the enterprise they are responsible for."--Publisher's description.
Stats for nerds
2recommend
6mentions
5people
2013–2022years
33% recommend67% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- 'The Purpose of a Business is to Create a Customer'
Drucker - 'The Practice of Management' is full of common sense 'anti-values'
- The Frontiers of Management, and The Practice of Management, both by Drucker, are excellent and inspiring. Especially the former.
- It's been a drag on the U.S. economy for decades. Design by PowerPoint. Even Drucker in "The Practice of Management" didn't preach technical ignorance - but federation (2 pizza rule) and nurturing the craftsmen.
What I want to know is why hasn't A16Z industrialized the SAAS startup? A whitelabel RapidAPI. Support MVP templates in a few stock frameworks (Django,Rails,Rocket, Serverless) with a shared proprietary catalog of widgets, testing suites, and feature toggling management. Offer HR as a service for pay/benefits management and general ledgers as a service to simplify accounting. Internal git bounties on features - send us a PR to do X and we pay Y - for low friction contracting and to lower global burn rate.
- You got me curious as well, so I went looking. According to Michael Port in his own Beyond Booked Solid, the quote is from Drucker in Drucker's The Practice of Management.
http://books.google.com/books?id=gyKbgTCs2e0C&pg=PT10&dq=%22...
- autoworkers == un-skilled labor
managers == skilled labor
From Drucker's The Practice of Management:
A scant twenty years ago, it was widely believed that the mass-production technology—yesterday’s industrial revolution—threw people out of work. Today we know that wherever it has been introduced, it has rapidly increased the number of job opportunities in industry. But it is still widely believed that mass production replaces skilled labor by unskilled labor. We know this today to be a fallacy. In the United States, for instance, where mass-production methods have been applied on the broadest scale, the class of employees that has been growing most rapidly in numbers and proportion is that of skilled and trained people. And the truly unskilled laborer of yesterday, who contributed only his brawn, has become the semi-skilled machine operator of today—a man of higher skill and education, producing more wealth, earning a vastly higher standard of living.[1]
I think Drucker would argue that "Developers" are the new class of "Managers".
[1]Drucker, Peter F. (2010-04-02). The Practice of Management (Kindle Locations 490-496). HarperBusiness. Kindle Edition.
- "There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer" - Peter Drucker's The Practice of Management[1]
Let's take shareholders (both internal/external) out of the equation for a second... What do profits really actually do for companies? You take those profits, reinvest them to create even more customers. Amazon does that, and very aggressively, and for about 18 years and counting.
[1] - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060878975/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...
