Hegel-scholar Matthew Stewart has a funny piece in The Atlantic on management fads and gurus and the management consultant biz. In Stewart's view, businesses would be better off studying Nietzsche and Heidegger.
But in fact the greatest "guru" of the last century had absorbed German classical philosophy. This year is the centennial celebration of Peter Drucker, and The Drucker Institute has a run-down of the planned events.
Peter Drucker was hounded out of Germany by the Nazis and this turned out be huge benefit to American business. Unfortunately, many of Drucker's lessons have been forgotten or ignored, which explains, in part, why we are in the worst economic recession since the Great Depression. The purpose of the business enterprise, Drucker believed, was NOT to maximize shareholder value, but to create a "plant community" in which not only a person's economic needs but his social ones could be fulfilled. A good manager was a "community builder" and not just focused on the pursuit of profits. Drucker was one the biggest critics of obscene CEO salaries, not just because of the money, but because he feared that such salaries were “the embodiment of the ethics and values of American business and management,” and undermined the legitimacy of the business system itself. Long before Wall Street imploded from a reckless pursuit of mortgage-backed riches Drucker criticized traders as "pigs gorging themselves at the trough". With amazing prescience, Drucker predicted that the breakdown in the social contract between business leaders and community would result in the center of financial power shifting from Wall Street to Washington DC.
Peter Drucker never abandoned his understanding of the corporation as fundamentally a social institution:
Since the big-business corporation has become America's representative social institution it must realize the basic beliefs of American society - at least enough to satisfy minimal requirements. It must give status and function to the individual, and it must give him the justice of equal opportunities. This does not mean that the economic purpose of the corporation, efficient production, is to be subordinated to the social function, or that the fulfillment of society's basic belief is to be subordinated to the profit and survival interest of the individual business. The corporation can only function as the representative social institution of our society if it can fulfill its social functions in a manner which strengthens it as an efficient producer, and vice versa. But as the representative social institution of our society the corporation in addition to being an economic tool is a political and social body; its social function as a community is as important as its economic function as an efficient producer. (Peter Drucker, Concept of the Corporation 1946)
How simply and clearly Drucker puts it.
Posted by: hattie | May 13, 2009 at 12:50 AM