A Year with Peter Drucker - 52 Weeks of Coaching for Leadership Effectiveness

Week 13

The First Job in Any Organization Is to Make Top Management Effective

Introduction

Peter Drucker often told of how, like every other innovator, he built on the work of others and then added the missing pieces. He understood the practice of management as a “configuration” requiring the integration of existing “knowledges” and the addition of missing knowledges into a whole. He describes it as synthesizing known pieces and creating missing pieces:²⁵

My own success as an innovator in the management field was based on a similar analysis in the early 1940s. Many of the required pieces of knowledge were already available: organization theory, for instance, but also quite a bit of knowledge about managing work and worker. My analysis ...