Peter F. Drucker and 'Managing Ignorance,'
----2005
敬弔 現代經營學、社會觀察大師 Peter Drucker
Q.在所有的管理經典裡，您會推薦哪一本，可以做為現代管理者的智慧泉源？而又有哪些管理之外的領域，是值得現代管理者多所關注的呢？
A. 亞佛瑞‧史隆（Alfred Sloan）所著的《我與通用汽車》（My Years with General
Motors），這是我推薦所有管理者閱讀的書。而管理者需要在經濟學、心理學以及政治科學方面多所涉獵。」
We tend to think of Drucker as forever old, a gnomic and mysterious elder. At least I always did. His speech, always slow and measured, was forever accented in that commanding Viennese. His wisdom could not have come from anyone who was young. So it's easy to forget his dashing youth, his long devotion to one woman and their four children (until the end, Drucker still greeted his wife of 71 years with an effusive "Hello, my darling!"), or even his deliciously self-deprecating sense of play.
Peter F. Drucker and 'Managing Ignorance,'
----2005
妻讀了我寫的 Peter Drucker ，說想讀 My Years with General Motors。她說她也是『經營者』…..
我說你讀不下去。過兩天，我推薦她讀Drucker的回憶錄。
報紙上都一面倒。
我在1990-91年教東海化工系，就是用Peter Drucker的『管理學』（台灣1973約有三種翻譯），那時版權在聯經。不過，我也讀過，有人說『管理學』也只是泛泛之言而已。
敬弔 現代經營學、社會觀察大師 Peter Drucker
2005年11月12日19：55從NHK廣播知道先生仙逝。（日美影響力、 員工是資產、 1965年三等瑞寶勳章……）
Peter F. Drucker, a Pioneer in Social and Management Theory, Is Dead at 95
今天，看到廖月娟譯的先生《旁觀者：杜拉克回憶錄》（Adventures of a Bystander by Peter Ferdinand Drucker ，1993重新發行）在大陸的機械工業出版社發行（台灣約10年前舊書）。
約半年前，我收聽先生的50分鐘收音機訪談。先生諄諄告誡美國人: 世界已經是多強國之局勢…….
像許多人一樣，我們從70年代初起，讀了先生二三十本的著作，受益良多……
約十年前，先生是少數可以用email給 The Economist 澄清觀點的人。
H. A. Simon的回憶錄上提過，與你等”主講” (?)世銀亞洲論壇。
先生稱 W. E. Deming 為 Ed.。你說，他對美國經營界有很深的挫折。
昨天，談 Sloan先生的 My Years With General Motors，引：「杜拉克在回憶錄上一章：「史隆的專業風彩」。1970s他為在發行的 My Years with General Motors 寫序。
二○○五年八月，在《每日遇見杜拉克》出版前夕，編輯部透過本書的共同作者兼編者馬齊里洛教授，與杜拉克對話，完成了這篇越洋專訪。杜拉克和馬齊里洛是多年至交，從他們的對話裡，我們得以窺見仍然轉動不息的大師心智世界。以下便是專訪摘要。http://www.bookzone.com.tw/event/cb600/p01.asp
Q.在所有的管理經典裡，您會推薦哪一本，可以做為現代管理者的智慧泉源？而又有哪些管理之外的領域，是值得現代管理者多所關注的呢？
A. 亞佛瑞‧史隆（Alfred Sloan）所著的《我與通用汽車》（My Years with General
Motors），這是我推薦所有管理者閱讀的書。而管理者需要在經濟學、心理學以及政治科學方面多所涉獵。」
Q.在所有的管理經典裡，您會推薦哪一本，可以做為現代管理者的智慧泉源？而又有哪些管理之外的領域，是值得現代管理者多所關注的呢？
A. 亞佛瑞‧史隆（Alfred Sloan）所著的《我與通用汽車》（My Years with General
Motors），這是我推薦所有管理者閱讀的書。而管理者需要在經濟學、心理學以及政治科學方面多所涉獵。」
We tend to think of Drucker as forever old, a gnomic and mysterious elder. At least I always did. His speech, always slow and measured, was forever accented in that commanding Viennese. His wisdom could not have come from anyone who was young. So it's easy to forget his dashing youth, his long devotion to one woman and their four children (until the end, Drucker still greeted his wife of 71 years with an effusive "Hello, my darling!"), or even his deliciously self-deprecating sense of play.
Peter F. Drucker, a Pioneer in Social and Management Theory, Is Dead at 95
Correction Appended
Peter F. Drucker, the political economist and author, whose view that big business and nonprofit enterprises were the defining innovation of the 20th century led him to pioneering social and management theories, died yesterday at his home in Claremont, Calif. He was 95.
His death was announced by Claremont Graduate University.
Mr. Drucker thought of himself, first and foremost, as a writer and teacher, though he eventually settled on the term "social ecologist." He became internationally renowned for urging corporate leaders to agree with subordinates on objectives and goals and then get out of the way of decisions about how to achieve them.
這本文集The Ecological Vision: Reflections on the American Condition (1993)台灣未翻譯Wikipedia article "Peter Drucker".
He challenged both business and labor leaders to search for ways to give workers more control over their work environment. He also argued that governments should turn many functions over to private enterprise and urged organizing in teams to exploit the rise of a technology-astute class of "knowledge workers."
Mr. Drucker staunchly defended the need for businesses to be profitable but he preached that employees were a resource, not a cost. His constant focus on the human impact of management decisions did not always appeal to executives, but they could not help noticing how it helped him foresee many major trends in business and politics.
He began talking about such practices in the 1940's and 50's, decades before they became so widespread that they were taken for common sense. Mr. Drucker also foresaw that the 1970's would be a decade of inflation, that Japanese manufacturers would become major competitors for the United States and that union power would decline.
For all his insights, he clearly owed much of his impact to his extraordinary energy and skills as a communicator. But while Mr. Drucker loved dazzling audiences with his wit and wisdom, his goal was not to be known as an oracle. Indeed, after writing a rosy-eyed article shortly before the stock market crash of 1929 in which he outlined why stocks prices would rise, he pledged to himself to stay away from gratuitous predictions. Instead, his views about where the world was headed generally arose out of advocacy for what he saw as moral action.
His first book ("The End of Economic Man," 1939)was intended to strengthen the will of the free world to fight fascism. His later economic and social predictions were intended to encourage businesses and social groups to organize in ways that he felt would promote human dignity and vaccinate society against political and economic chaos.
"He is remarkable for his social imagination, not his futurism," said Jack Beatty in a 1998 review of Mr. Drucker's work "The World According to Peter Drucker."
Mr. Drucker, who was born in Vienna and never completely shed his Austrian accent, worked in Germany as a reporter until Hitler rose to power and then in a London investment firm before emigrating to the United States in 1937. He became an American citizen in 1943.
Recalling the disasters that overran the Europe of his youth and watching the American response left him convinced that good managers were the true heroes of the century.
The world, especially the developed world, had recovered from repeated catastrophe because "ordinary people, people running the everyday concerns of business and institutions, took responsibility and kept on building for tomorrow while around them the world came crashing down," he wrote in 1986 in "The Frontiers of Management."
Mr. Drucker never hesitated to make suggestions he knew would be viewed as radical. He advocated legalization of drugs and stimulating innovation by permitting new ventures to charge the government for the cost of regulations and paperwork. He was not surprised that General Motors for years ignored nearly every recommendation in "The Concept of the Corporation," the book he published in 1946 after an 18-month study of G.M. that its own executives had commissioned.
From his early 20's to his death, Mr. Drucker held various teaching posts, including a 20-year stint at the Stern School of Management at New York University and, since 1971, a chair at the Claremont Graduate School of Management. He also consulted widely, devoting several days a month to such work into his 90's. His clients included G.M., General Electric and Sears, Roebuck but also the Archdiocese of New York and several Protestant churches; government agencies in the United States, Canada and Japan; universities; and entrepreneurs.
For over 50 years, at least half of the consulting work was done free for nonprofits and small businesses. As his career progressed and it became clearer that competitive pressures were keeping businesses from embracing many practices he advocated, like guaranteed wages and lifetime employment for industrial workers, he became increasingly interested in "the social sector," as he called the nonprofit groups.
Mr. Drucker counseled groups like the Girl Scouts to think like businesses even though their bottom line was "changed lives" rather than profits. He warned them that donors would increasingly judge them on results rather than intentions. In 1990, Frances Hesselbein, the former national director of the Girl Scouts, organized a group of admirers to honor him by setting up the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management in New York to expose nonprofits to Mr. Drucker's thinking and to new concepts in management.
Mr. Drucker's greatest impact came from his writing. His more than 30 books, which have sold tens of millions of copies in more than 30 languages, came on top of thousands of articles, including a monthly op-ed column in The Wall Street Journal from 1975 to 1995.
Among the sayings of Chairman Peter, as he was sometimes called, were these:
¶"Marketing is a fashionable term. The sales manager becomes a marketing vice president. But a gravedigger is still a gravedigger even when it is called a mortician - only the price of the burial goes up."
¶"One either meets or one works."
¶"The only things that evolve by themselves in an organization are disorder, friction and malperformance."
¶"Stock option plans reward the executive for doing the wrong thing. Instead of asking, 'Are we making the right decision?' he asks, 'How did we close today?' It is encouragement to loot the corporation."
Mr. Drucker's thirst for new experiences never waned. He became so fascinated with Japanese art during his trips to Japan after World War II that he eventually helped write "Adventures of the Brush: Japanese Paintings" (1979), and lectured on Oriental art at Pomona College in Claremont from 1975 to 1985.
比較書名 Song of the Brush: Japanese Painting from the Sanso Collection (1979)
Peter Ferdinand Drucker was born Nov. 19, 1909, one of two sons of Caroline and Adolph Drucker, a prominent lawyer and high-ranking civil servant in the Austro-Hungarian government. He left Vienna in 1927 to work for an export firm in Hamburg, Germany, and to study law.
Mr. Drucker then moved to Frankfurt, where he earned a doctorate in international and public law in 1931 from the University of Frankfurt, became a reporter and then senior editor in charge of financial and foreign news at the newspaper General-Anzeiger, and, while substitute teaching at the university, met Doris Schmitz, a 19-year-old student. They became reacquainted after waving madly while passing each other going opposite directions on a London subway escalator in 1933 and were married in 1937.
Mr. Drucker had moved to England to work as a securities analyst and writer after watching the rise of the Nazis with increasing alarm. In England, he took an economics course from John Maynard Keynes in Cambridge, but was put off by how much the talk centered on commodities rather than people.
Mr. Drucker's reputation as a political economist was firmly established with the publication in 1939 of "The End of Economic Man." The New York Times said it brought a "remarkable vision and freshness" to the understanding of fascism. The book's observations, along with those in articles he wrote for Harpers and The New Republic, caught the eye of policy makers in the federal government and at corporations as the country prepared for war, and landed him a job teaching at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y.
Writing "The Future of Industrial Man," published in 1942 after Mr. Drucker moved to Bennington College in Vermont, convinced him that he needed to understand big organizations from the inside. Rebuffed in his requests to work with several major companies, he was delighted when General Motors called in late 1943 proposing that he study its structure and policies. To avoid having him treated like a management spy, G.M. agreed to let him publish his findings.
Neither G.M. nor Mr. Drucker expected the public to be interested because no one had ever written such a management profile, but "The Concept of the Corporation" became an overnight sensation when it was published in 1946. " 'Concept of the Corporation' is a book about business the way 'Moby Dick' is a book about whaling," said Mr. Beatty, referring to the focus on social issues extending far beyond G.M.'s immediate operating challenges.
In it, Mr. Drucker argued that profitability was crucial to a business's health but more importantly to full employment. Management could achieve sustainable profits only by treating employees like valuable resources. That, he argued, required decentralizing the power to make decisions, including giving hourly workers more control over factory life, and guaranteed wages.
In the 1950's, Mr. Drucker began proclaiming that democratic governments had become too big to function effectively. This, he said, was a threat to the freedom of their citizens and to their economic well-being.
Unlike many conservative thinkers, Mr. Drucker wanted to keep government regulation over areas like food and drugs and finance. Indeed, he argued that the rise of global businesses required stronger governments and stronger social institutions, including more powerful unions, to keep them from forgetting social interests.
According to Claremont Graduate University, Mr. Drucker's survivors include his wife, Doris, an inventor and physicist; his children, Audrey Drucker of Puyallup, Wash., Cecily Drucker of San Francisco, Joan Weinstein of Chicago, and Vincent Drucker of San Rafael, Calif.; and six grandchildren.
Early last year, in an interview with Forbes magazine, Mr. Drucker was asked if there was anything in his long career that he wished he had done but had not been able to do.
"Yes, quite a few things," he said. "There are many books I could have written that are better than the ones I actually wrote. My best book would have been "Managing Ignorance," and I'm very sorry I didn't write it."
We are most likely these days to come across the phrase 'the weakest link' in reference to the popular TV quiz show of that name, which originated in the UK, hosted by Anne Robinson, and was later syndicated for use in many other countries. The show, which relies on the demonstration of the abysmal lack of general knowledge by many of the participating contestants, is an example of the many 'humiliation television' shows of the early 21st century and is a sad spectacle.
It is clearly a literal fact that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. The conversion of that notion into a figurative phrase was established in the language by the 18th century. Thomas Reid's Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, 1786, included this line: