The alternative to autonomous institutions that function and perform is not freedom. It is totalitarian tyranny.
If the institutions of our pluralist society of institutions do not perform in a responsible autonomy, we will not have individualism and a society in which there is a chance for people to fulfill themselves. We will, instead, impose on ourselves complete regimentation in which no one will be allowed autonomy. We will have a Stalinism rather than participatory democracy, let alone the joyful spontaneity of doing one's own thing. Tyranny is the only alternative to strong, performing autonomous institutions.
Tyranny substitutes one absolute boss for the pluralism of competing institutions. It substitutes terror for responsibility. It does indeed do away with the institutions, but only by submerging all of them in the one all-embracing bureaucracy of the apparat. It does produce goods and services, though only fitfully, wastefully, at a low level, and at an enormous costs in suffering, humiliation, and frustration. To make our institutions perform responsibly, autonomously, and on a high level of achievement is thus the only safeguard of freedom and dignity in the pluralist society of institutions. Performing, responsible management is the alternative to tyranny and our only protection against it.
ACTION POINT: What steps can you take now to improve the performance of the institution for which you are responsible?
Quoted from The Daily Drucker, January 10 , Page 12
Friday, January 10, 2014
Thursday, January 9, 2014
The Daily Drucker: January 9 - The New Corporation's Persona
In the Next Society's corporation, top management will be the company, Everything else can be outsourced.
Increasingly, in the Next Society's corporation, top management will, in fact, be the company. This top management's responsibility will cover the entire organization's direction, planning, strategy, values and principles; its structure and relationships between the various members; its alliances, partnerships, and joint ventures; its research, design and innovation.
Establishing a new corporate persona calls for change in the corporation's values. And that may well be the most important task for top management. In the half century after the Second World War, the business corporation has brilliantly proven itself as an economic organization, as a creator of wealth and jobs. In the Next Society, the biggest challenge for the large company and especially for the multinational may be its social legitimacy - its values, its mission, its vision. Everything else can be outsourced.
ACTION POINT: Focus on your organization's values, mission and vision, and consider outsourcing everything else.
Quoted from The Daily Drucker, 9 January, page 11
Increasingly, in the Next Society's corporation, top management will, in fact, be the company. This top management's responsibility will cover the entire organization's direction, planning, strategy, values and principles; its structure and relationships between the various members; its alliances, partnerships, and joint ventures; its research, design and innovation.
Establishing a new corporate persona calls for change in the corporation's values. And that may well be the most important task for top management. In the half century after the Second World War, the business corporation has brilliantly proven itself as an economic organization, as a creator of wealth and jobs. In the Next Society, the biggest challenge for the large company and especially for the multinational may be its social legitimacy - its values, its mission, its vision. Everything else can be outsourced.
ACTION POINT: Focus on your organization's values, mission and vision, and consider outsourcing everything else.
Quoted from The Daily Drucker, 9 January, page 11
Wednesday, January 8, 2014
The Daily Drucker: January 8 - Autonomy in Knowledge Work
Knowledge work requires both autonomy and accountability.
Demanding of knowledge workers that they define their own task and its results is necessary because knowledge workers must be autonomous. As knowledge varies among different people, even in the same field, each knowledge worker carries his or her own unique set of knowledge. With this specialized, unique knowledge, each worker should know more about his or her specific area than anyone else in the organization. Indeed, knowledge workers must know more about their areas than anyone else; they get paid to be knowledgeable in their fields. What this means is that once each knowledge worker has defined his or her own task and once the work has been appropriately restructured, each worker should be expected to work out his or her own course and to take responsibility for it.
Knowledge workers should be asked to think their own work plans and then submit them. What am I going to focus on? What results can be expected for which I should be held accountable? By what deadline? Knowledge work requires both autonomy and accountability.
ACTION POINT: Write a work plan that includes your focus, desired results, and deadline. Submit it to your boss.
Quoted from The Daily Drucker, January 8 , Page 10
Demanding of knowledge workers that they define their own task and its results is necessary because knowledge workers must be autonomous. As knowledge varies among different people, even in the same field, each knowledge worker carries his or her own unique set of knowledge. With this specialized, unique knowledge, each worker should know more about his or her specific area than anyone else in the organization. Indeed, knowledge workers must know more about their areas than anyone else; they get paid to be knowledgeable in their fields. What this means is that once each knowledge worker has defined his or her own task and once the work has been appropriately restructured, each worker should be expected to work out his or her own course and to take responsibility for it.
Knowledge workers should be asked to think their own work plans and then submit them. What am I going to focus on? What results can be expected for which I should be held accountable? By what deadline? Knowledge work requires both autonomy and accountability.
ACTION POINT: Write a work plan that includes your focus, desired results, and deadline. Submit it to your boss.
Quoted from The Daily Drucker, January 8 , Page 10
Tuesday, January 7, 2014
The Daily Drucker; January 7 - Knowledge Workers: Asset Not Cost
Management's duty is to preserve the assets of the institution in its care.
Knowledge workers own the means of production. It is the knowledge between their ears. And it is a totally portable and enormous capital asset. Because knowledge workers own their means of production, they are mobile. Manual workers need the job much more that the job needs them. It may still not be true for all knowledge workers that the organization needs them more than they need the organization. But for most of them it is a symbiotic relationship in which the two need each other in equal measure.
Management's duty is to preserve the assets of the institution in its care. What does this mean when the knowledge of the individual knowledge worker becomes an asset and, in more and more cases, the main asset of the institution? What does this mean for personnel policy? What is needed to attract and to hold the highest-producing knowledge workers? What is needed to increase their productivity and to convert their increased productivity into performance capacity for the organization?
ACTION POINT: Attract and hold the highest-producing knowledge workers by treating them and their knowledge as the organization's most valuable assets.
Quoted from The Daily Drucker, Page 9
Knowledge workers own the means of production. It is the knowledge between their ears. And it is a totally portable and enormous capital asset. Because knowledge workers own their means of production, they are mobile. Manual workers need the job much more that the job needs them. It may still not be true for all knowledge workers that the organization needs them more than they need the organization. But for most of them it is a symbiotic relationship in which the two need each other in equal measure.
Management's duty is to preserve the assets of the institution in its care. What does this mean when the knowledge of the individual knowledge worker becomes an asset and, in more and more cases, the main asset of the institution? What does this mean for personnel policy? What is needed to attract and to hold the highest-producing knowledge workers? What is needed to increase their productivity and to convert their increased productivity into performance capacity for the organization?
ACTION POINT: Attract and hold the highest-producing knowledge workers by treating them and their knowledge as the organization's most valuable assets.
Quoted from The Daily Drucker, Page 9
Monday, January 6, 2014
The Daily Drucker: January 6 – Practice of Abandonment
If we did not do this
already, would we get into it now?
The question has to be asked – and ask seriously – “If we
did not do this already, would we, knowing what we know, go into it now?” If the answer is no, the reaction must be
“What do we do now?”
In three cases the right action is always outright
abandonment. Abandonment is the right
action if a product, service, market, or process “still has a few years of
life.” It is these dying products,
services, or processes that always demand the greatest care and the greatest
efforts. They tie down the most
productive and the ablest people. But equally, a product, service, market or
process should be abandoned if the only argument for keep it is “It is fully
written off.” For management purposes there are no “cost-less assets.” There are only “sunk costs.” The third case where abandonment is the right
policy – and the most important one – is the one where, for the sake of
maintaining the old or declining product, service, market, or process the new and growing product, service, or
market is being stunted or neglected.
ACTION POINT: Ask the question posed above and if the answer
is no, make the tough choice to abandon a cherished business.
Quoted from The Daily Drucker, Page 8
Quoted from The Daily Drucker, Page 8
The Daily Drucker: January 5 - Abandonment
There is nothing as
difficult and as expensive, but nothing as futile, as trying to keep a corpse from
stinking
Effective executives know that they have to get many things
dome effectively. Therefore, they concentrate. And the first rule for the concentration of
the executive efforts is to slough off the past that has ceased to be
productive. The first-class resources,
especially those scares resources of the human strength, are immediately pulled
out and put to work on the opportunities of tomorrow. If leaders are unable to slough off
yesterday, to abandon yesterday, they simply will not be able to create
tomorrow.
Without systematic and purposeful abandonment, an
organisation will be overtaken by events.
It will squander its best resources on things it should have never been
doing or should no longer do. As a
result, it will lack the resources, especially capable people, needed to
exploit the opportunities that arise.
Far too few businesses are willing to slough off yesterday, and as a
result, far too few have resources available for tomorrow.
ACTION POINT: Stop squandering resources on obsolete
businesses and free up your capable people to take advantage of new
opportunities.
Quoted from The Daily Drucker, Page 7
Quoted from The Daily Drucker, Page 7
Sunday, January 5, 2014
The Daily Drucker: January 4 - Organizational Inertia
All organizations need a discipline that makes them face up to reality.
All organizations need to know that virtually no program or activity will perform effectively for a long time without modification and redesign. Eventually every activity becomes obsolete. Among organizations that ignore this fact, the worst offender is government. Indeed, the inability to stop doing anything is the central disease of government and a major reason why government today is sick. Hospitals and universities are only a little better than government in getting rid of yesterday.
Businessmen are just as sentimental about yesterday as bureaucrats. They are just as likely to respond to the failure of a product or program by doubling the efforts invested in it. But they are, fortunately, unable to indulge freely in their predilections. They stand under an objective discipline of the market. They have an objective outside measurement, profitability. And so they are forced to slough off the unsuccessful and unproductive sooner than later. In other organizations - government, hospitals, the military and so on - economics is only a restraint.
All organizations must be capable of change. We need concepts and measurements that give to the other kinds of organizations what the market test and profitability yardstick give to business. Those tests and yardsticks will be quite different.
ACTION POINT: Make sure your nonprofit organization has rigorous tests and yardsticks to measure performance.
Quoted from The Daily Drucker, Page 6
All organizations need to know that virtually no program or activity will perform effectively for a long time without modification and redesign. Eventually every activity becomes obsolete. Among organizations that ignore this fact, the worst offender is government. Indeed, the inability to stop doing anything is the central disease of government and a major reason why government today is sick. Hospitals and universities are only a little better than government in getting rid of yesterday.
Businessmen are just as sentimental about yesterday as bureaucrats. They are just as likely to respond to the failure of a product or program by doubling the efforts invested in it. But they are, fortunately, unable to indulge freely in their predilections. They stand under an objective discipline of the market. They have an objective outside measurement, profitability. And so they are forced to slough off the unsuccessful and unproductive sooner than later. In other organizations - government, hospitals, the military and so on - economics is only a restraint.
All organizations must be capable of change. We need concepts and measurements that give to the other kinds of organizations what the market test and profitability yardstick give to business. Those tests and yardsticks will be quite different.
ACTION POINT: Make sure your nonprofit organization has rigorous tests and yardsticks to measure performance.
Quoted from The Daily Drucker, Page 6
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