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.

Charles Handy and Potfolio Lifes

What interested me was not the downsizing or the re-engineering itself, but the consequences for our individual working lives. Organizations, it seemed to me, would increasingly dispense with our services in our mid-lives as they concentrated on fewer and younger people in their cores, with only a few wise heads to keep the show on track. The rest of us would have to develop what I called 'portfolio' lives, a mix of different bits and pieces of work, some for money, some for fun, some for free.

That quote was from Charles Handy, in the second episode of his Handy Guide to the Gurus of Management, hardly about management, but about society.

The Handy Guide to the Gurus of Management

From BBC's Learning English, The Handy Guide to the Gurus of Management, an old (2002?) and delightful audio series.

Do not miss it.

It is written and narrated by Charles Handy. Listening to Handy's voice is a pleasure. And it does not matter if you don't care about businesses or management: most of it is about society and some of the changes in our world during the last half century.

Each episode is less than 15 minutes long, and has a full transcript.

Analyze your traffic without you

Even when you have like a dozen visits a day, checking google analytics now and then is nice (hey! a vsitor from Belize!). However, it is nice to be able to tell what traffic comes from yourself and what comes from your two readers (if any). A bookmarklet can help you to enable a filter that will allow analytics to remove you from its stats, or even to track your own usage of your site.

El autor sin abuela y la teoría de la organización

La portada de la PDA gigante era un mal augurio. Si no fuera porque el material de la asignatura Organización y administración de empresas II, que curso en la UOC, está basado en gran parte en este libro, la PDA platillo volante habría sido suficiente para dejar el libro en la estantería de la biblioteca.

Pero, ¿qué importa una portada? Se trata de los contenido, y parezco estar en buenas manos. Al menos, el autor, Eduardo Bueno Campos, no tiene la menor duda de ello; de los prólogos de la primera y segunda edición extraigo las siguientes muestas

la aparición, en 1976, de la primera edición de mi obra clásica

esta década transcurrida ha provocado que mi cosecha intelectual y mi patrimonio científico se haya incrementado de forma destacada, con un buen número de artículos en revistas nacionales e internacionales de impacto científico, así como nuevos libros...

Pero leo y leo y, ¡ay! , no puedo compartir el entusiasmo del autor por el mismo autor. Y, básicamente, todo se reduce a que soy incapaz de relacionar mi percepción sobre las organizaciones con las que convivo o he convivido con la mayoría de cosas de las que me habla el libro. Capítulos enteros sin entender de dónde venía el texto (¿descripción de la realidad? ¿prescripción para mejores organizaciones? ¿alguna escuela de pensamiento reconocida? ¿el propio autor? ¿palabra revelada?).

Otro libro sobre teoría de la organización describe muy bien porque me interesa la teoría de la organización y por qué me decepciona no disfrutar leyendo o discutiendo sobre ella:

all forms of collective activity - politics, the family, as well as work - are about organizations in some way. Which also means - and it is a major failing of most books to ignore this - that to study organizations involves thinking about philosophy, politics, ethics and much more. And behind or beyond these abstractions are the lived experiences of people not just working together, but joking, arguing, critizing, fighting, deciding, lusting, despairing, creating, resisting, fearing, hoping or, in short, organizing. I don't find it easy to imagine a world without organizations, but I also don't find it easy to recognize that world in the mainstream books about organizations

He disfrutado de este segundo libro como de una novela, aunque a menudo he estado en desacuerdo con el autor Chris Grey. Otro día, más sobre el estupendo A Very Short Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book About Studying Organizations.

Comprant llibres

M'he convertit en un entusiasta de The Book Depository. Normalment hi comprava els llibres via amazon.fr; acostumaven a sortir-me una mica més barats que comprant-los a Amazon mateix. Ara els compro directament, amb enviament gratuït, i encara em surt una mica més barat.

amazon.com, però, segueix sent insustituible a l'hora de buscar opinions. I sempre intento començar llegint algunes de les opinions amb menys estrelles. Entre altres motius, per què em convé més que em convencin de no comprar un llibre que de fer-ho.

Bonuses

Henry Mintzberg:

Executive compensation has become a polite form of thievery, or, if you prefer, legal corruption. Executives get paid extra when the stock price goes up (bonus) and when it goes down (golden parachute); they get paid extra for staying in their job (retention bonus (...)), and for just doing their job (a bonus for signing a merger (...)).

As for the argument that if you don’t pay the bonuses, you don’t get the right person, I counter that if you do pay the bonuses, you get the wrong person. You get someone who is willing to single him or herself out from everyone else, at the expense of teamwork (...). The CEO, like everyone else in the company, has a job to do and should be paid for doing it. (...)

For the sake of sustainable enterprise: Executive bonuses should be eliminated. Period.

From http://www.mintzberg.org/pdf/execbonus.pdf

Once things have happened once

Charles Frankel, in High on Foggy Bottom; an Outsider's Inside View of the Government

Once things have happened, no matter how accidentally, they will be regarded as manifestations of an unchangeable Higher Reason. For every argument inside government that some jerry-built bureaucratic arrangement should be changed, there are usually twenty arguments to show that it rest's on God's own Logic, an that tampering with it will bring down the heavens.

Likely to be a valid statement also for individuals