Martin Henry
PETER DRUCKER, management master, has cleared his office and gone home after what seems like an eternity in the business.
Drucker, the man who more than any other defined management, died on Friday, November 11, a tad short of 96. He had been shaping management theory and practice for the better part of 70 years!
Management education, inescapably stamped with Drucker's thought, has exploded here over the last few years. On Tuesday evening I spent a very pleasant and elegant two hours with the Mona School of Business (MSB) at its annual awards ceremony. The country's leading management education institution and the only exclusively dedicated management school can hardly expand fast enough to satisfy demand despite the hefty price tags attached.
And the graduates of here and there are being absorbed into the economy without too much trouble. But Peter Drucker would have wanted to know, as I do, how MBAs change the productivity and performance of managers and of whole economies. MSB alone has pumped about 1,000 MBAs into a rather small economy which has nonetheless managed to set some kind of global record for the retrogression of productivity and the stagnation of economic growth.
ANALYSING AND PRESCRIBING
I ran into Peter Drucker purely by accident. I am not really into 'management' and have my deep suspicions of, and an uneasy relationship with, the 'organisation' which Drucker spent his life analysing and prescribing for. But in 1988 I picked up a discarded copy of People and Performance: The Best of Peter Drucker on Management just when I started 'managing' a small institution.
The master started out in the preface dryly saying, "nine out of every ten young people attending college will become employees in organisations, for it is primarily in organisations that there are opportunities to apply knowledge to performance and that one gets paid for being educated."
Ducker went on to say, "It is only because we have learned in the last hundred years to build and to structure organisations that we can offer opportunities and jobs to millions of educated people. And organisations are held together, directed and made to function by managers and management. The specific job of the manager is to make the strengths of people productive and their weaknesses irrelevant." We obviously need many more managers in Jamaica who have grasped this fundamental Drucker point.
"Indeed, if there is one right way to define management," Drucker concluded, "it is as the work and function that enables people to perform and to achieve."
35 BOOKS
Peter Drucker wrote some 35 books starting in 1937 and the most recent is due out next year. I read his celebrated 1989 The New Realities with gripping interest. "This book is about 'things to come', "he deadpanned in typical Drucker style. In The New Realities Drucker sharply crystallised an idea that had been flowing through his work, the idea of management as a liberal art, something which means a lot to me because of my own interests and work, and something which has been widely picked up and endlessly quoted. "Management is thus what tradition used to call a liberal art", Drucker wrote. 'Liberal' because it deals with the fundamentals of knowledge, self-knowledge, wisdom, and leadership; 'art' because it is practice and application. Managers draw on all the knowledges and insights of the humanities and the social sciences - on psychology and philosophy, on economics and history, on the physical sciences and ethics. But they have to focus this knowledge on effectiveness and results.
"For these reasons," Drucker announced, "management will increasingly be the discipline and the practice through which the humanities will again acquire recognition, impact, and relevance." Drucker is right - again - and this has profound implications for the way we do 21st century education. Working with managers to get their
liberal arts right has been one of my most rewarding activities.
Martin Henry is a communication specialist.
