Thread by @delong

Peter F. Drucker: The Once and Future Manager: ‘The professional manager has not one job, but three. The first is to make economic resources economically productive. The manager has an entrepreneurial job, a job of moving resources from yesterday into tomorrow; a job, not... 1/

...of minimizing risk, of minimizing risk, but of maximizing opportunity. Then there is a managerial or ‘administrative’ job of making human resources productive, of making people work together, bringing to a common task their individual skills and knowledge; a job of... 2/

...making strengths productive and weaknesses irrelevant which is the purpose of organization. Organization is a machine for maximizing human strengths. Then there is a third function…. They are public. They are visible. They represent. They stand for something in the... 3/

...community. In fact, they are the only leading group in society…. Managers have a public function… Royal Commissions … the local Boy Scout troop…. within their own business by leadership and example. But they always do discharge it. Nothing anybody who is a manager... 4/

...does is private, in the sense that one can say: ‘This is my own affair. It does not concern anybody else. What I do is, therefore, of no real interest to anybody.” Managers are on the stage, with the spotlight on them… 5/

LINK: <oreilly.com/library/view/p…>

...Peter F. Drucker: Management: ‘Friedman’s argument that business is an economic institution and should stick to its economic task is well taken…. But it is also clear that social responsibility cannot be evaded. It is not only that the public demands it. It is not only... 6/

...that society needs it. The fact remains that in modern society there is no other leadership group but managers. If the managers of our major institutions, and especially of business, do not take responsibility for the common good, no one else can or will… 7

...LINK: <archive.org/details/manage…>

The young Peter F. Drucker was one of the more more interesting young moral philosophers in early 1900s Vienna all of whom brushed up against one another—alongside Karl & Michael Polanyi, their fascist cousin Odon Pol, Victor Adler, Josef... 8/

...Schumpeter, Karl Popper, Friedrich von Hayek, and many more.

Peter F. Drucker, however, then when came to the United States followed a very different trajectory (after getting Karl Polanyi his job at Bennington College) than any of the others. He became the U.S.’s... 9/

...BOSS management consultant and managerial theorist. But he remained someone who always hunted the same game as the Polanyis, von Hayek, Schumpeter and company. Pinned between Schumpeter, von Hayek, Karl Polanyi, and the shadow of Karl Marx, Peter F. Drucker sought... 10/

...his reconciliation of the antinomies of modern industrial society in the figure of the manager, whose social role was precisely to arrange things so that society could be an “association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development... 11/

...all”.

Note that Drucker's manager is in many ways the polar opposite of Alasdair Macintyre's. Macintyre's is the pursuer of instrumental rationality on behalf of his principals, whatever their values and interests may be. Drucker's manager is the trustee of... 12/

...civilization, a member of a Michael Polanyian-type priestly profession in which one works not so much for one's principals as for the smooth, efficient operation of the system as a whole in a way that makes sense to and reconciles the interests of all stakeholders... 13/

...freedom and community, efficiency and equity, order and disruption are then reconciled through the judgments and values of this particular honorable professional castes of managers. 14/END

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