By Zachary First
IN Moore’s Law, Gordon Moore declared that the power of silicon chips would double every 18 months. Contrast that with Peter Drucker’s much more sober statement about the art of managing people:
“We are not going to breed a new race of supermen. We will have to run our organizations with people as they are.”Together they capture the difference between technological progress, which in certain periods occurs exponentially, and the “progress” we make in changing human nature—which is no progress at all.
Because human nature doesn’t change, the fundamental art and science of managing humans doesn’t change either. This doesn’t mean that managers today should do exactly the same things that they did 100 years ago. When the purposes, processes and technologies of work change, we need to alter how we manage. But these changes should be to management’s tactics, not its basic function.
Managerial effectiveness has always been based on management engaging in the three tasks that Drucker identified as uniquely its own: focusing the organization on its specific purpose; making work both productive and suitable for human beings; and taking responsibility for the organization’s social impacts.
If these are the tasks, then here are the action items:
• Direct all of the organization’s work toward making strength productive and weakness irrelevant. On the organization’s behalf, this means holding every measure of effort—time, talent or treasure—accountable for the results it must produce in order to justify its expenditure. On the worker’s behalf, this means placing people according to their strengths and governing them in ways that embrace their unique identities.
• Ask if every product, service, program and policy in your organization serves your purpose. No matter the type of organization, the purpose is always social: Businesses exist to create customers, nonprofits to change lives and governments to effectively express the “common will and the common vision,” as Drucker put it. On a regular basis, put everything your organization does on trial for its life according to this standard.
• Ensure that organizational problems do not become social problems. And seek to turn social problems into organizational opportunities. Every organization depends for its existence on the world beyond its walls. When organizational problems spill over into the outside world, the organization almost always suffers.
When management stops chasing silver bullets and instead, embraces its essential tasks, it will eventually be faced with some profound questions: When an organization’s mission becomes outmoded, what should it do? Amid the rise of machine intelligence, where is the value in human work?
These are more than just questions of profit or productivity. They are questions of community, morality and the meaning of human life. Which is exactly why they belong to management, the consummate social function.
Zachary First is executive director of the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University.