Customer Reviews

Management Rev Ed

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I'd always thought Management was about practice and good examples you had been lucky to receive during your career. At a certain point of my career though, evidences proved I was not confortable with that statement anymore. I felt Management had its principles, rules, laws, but I was missing the education to prove it and sustain it among coleagues, peers, and my reports. Drucker's "Management" filled that abysmal gap and gave me back the confidence that my "feelings" were not devoid of fundaments.

EVERY entrepreneur and EVERY small business owner should read this book. If you read it "way back when..."--then read it again! If you've never read it, then order it today! Drucker's advice to go out and TALK to customers and non-customers is key, especially in our email-based and Internet communications era. And Drucker's advice to help others by volunteering for nonprofit agencies is critical to your business, as well as to our communities. Bottom line is if we want people to hire us, buy from us, or invest in our companies, they have to know who we are and why they should do business with us - and they have to respect us as members of the world as well as local communities.(The reviewer is author of two books: Personal Publicity Planner: A Guide to Marketing YOU and Top Cops: Profiles of Women in Command.)

I had the previous edition of this same book, which was Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices sometime ago before I gave it to someone else. This new edition appears to have taken out a lot of content from the previous one. Something I doubt Peter Drucker himself would have sanctioned had he been alive today. I would suggest purchasing the previous edition together with this new edition for a more balanced treatment. For those who tend to think this "revised" or "updated" edition is better, I can only say "caveat emptor".

The original Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices has been competently revised by Joseph Maciariello. The original book was written in 1973/74 and is still considered a classic. However, it has examples which date to 1960s IBM, Sears, Siemens, etc, - not making much sense to today's management readers. Also, Drucker was an extremely prolific writer (when asked which is his best book, he would say 'my next one') with a very fertile imagination. All the subsequent major ideas from Drucker find a place in this revised edition. In this book, there is a chapter (Introduction to the Revised Edition) which provides a nice integrated ('systems') view of the book. The book spans over all important topics. Some of the major headings include "Business Performance", "Productive Work and Achieving Worker", "Managerial Skills", "Innovation and Entrepreneurship", "Managerial Organization", and "New Demands on the Individual". One of my favorites is Chapter 47: Revitalizing Oneself - Seven Personal Experience - this is by itself was worth the money I paid for. Very reluctantly, I came around the view that this book is written more concisely than the original classic. Read it and become a better manager by integrating the recommended practices. If there is one book that distills the monumental wisdom of Drucker into one readable book - this is it. I recommend it very highly. It is an absolute must-read.

I've always appreciated Drucker's philosophies and principles of management and his character and integrity, which comes through in his messages. I've not read the previous edition so, I can't compare them. But, based on another review, I've ordered a used copy to read what was missing in the update.
The book is brilliantly written to make one think inside themselves and their organization. If you are a top leader, you MUST read this book (over and over). I've read some of the chapters from other Drucker publications but to have them combined in this book is convenient.

While writing a presentation for my boss and needed some reference, I came upon the 1974 edition of this book in my library. I found myself unable to stop reading all the precious words of wisdom Drucker has had to offer. It was a moment of "Aha! Eureka!" for me where the concepts that I knew intuitively were being articulated into words, direct, clear and easy to understand. It reads very much like a person talking to you, and Drucker probably wrote this book using material from a collection of speeches he once delivered to people hungry for his advice.

When I finally decided to purchased the book, I bought the revised edition, but unfortunately, I felt it lost much of the initial "Eureka!" effect. Consider the following quotations from the book:

1974 edition (The Purpose of a Business):
"It is the customer who determines what a business is. It is the customer alone whose willingness to pay for a good or for a service converts economic resources into wealth, things into goods. What the business thinks it produces is not of first importance - especially not to the future of the business and to its success. The typical engineering definition of quality is something that is hard to do, is complicated, and costs a lot of money! But that isn't quality; it's incompetence. What the customer thinks he is buying, what he considers value, is decisive - it determines what a business is, what it produces, and whether it will prosper. And what the customer buys and considers value is never a product. It is always utility, that is what a product or service does for him. And what is value for the customer is, as we shall (in Chapter 7), anything but obvious."

Revised 2008 edition (The Purpose of a Business):
"It is the customer who determines what a business is. It is the customer alone whose willingness to pay for a good or for a service converts economic resources into wealth, things into goods. And what the customer buys and considers value is never a product. It is always utility, that is what a product or service does for him."

Since I work in an industry closely related to engineering that involves churning out drawings after drawings, the additional explanation by Drucker's original 1974 edition, where defining "engineering quality" as "incompetence" was a shocker to me when I first read it. It got my attention to want to understand why as a Manager, Drucker thinks that a shift in the thinking of an engineer is needed in order to run a great business - a shift in thinking where the product (utility) is viewed from the end-user, rather than from the engineer's perspective. This is absent in the revised edition and subsequently the "Eureka!" effect is lost.

Consider another example:

1974 edition (Strategic Planning):
"We can now attempt to define what strategic thinking is. It is the continuous process of making present entrepreneurial (risk-taking) decisions systematically and with the greatest knowledge of their futurity; organizing systematically the efforts needed to carry out these decisions; and measuring the results of these decisions against the expectations through organized, systematic feedback."

Revised 2008 edition (Strategic Planning):
(The whole 1974 text is absent - the closest equivalent explanation is this passage) "Practically every basic management decision is a long-range decision - ten years is a rather short time span these days. Whether concerned with research or with building a new plant, designing a new marketing organization or a new product, every major management decision takes years before it is really effective. And it has to be productive for years thereafter to pay off the investment of people and money. Managers, therefore, need to be skilled in making decisions with long futurity on a systemic basis."

I find that Maciariello, despite being "one of Drucker's foremost students and protégés", took too much liberty in interpretation, rather than leaving Drucker's original words for the reader to interpret them according to their experiences (whether you are a manager with a marketing background or a manager from an engineering background, or sales). I also find that the revised edition is written with too much of an assumption that the reader is familiar with Drucker and skips through many of the very basic definitions and explanations (see example 2). However, I think it is the simplicity of the original 1974 edition that gives it its profound impact.
Buyer take note.

To say that Peter F. Drucker wrote the book on management is absolutely accurate, but only if you make that plural. During his long lifetime, "the founding father of the study of management" published 34 major works, including 15 on the art and science of enterprise management. Drucker had a front-row seat for the managerial exploits of the 20th century's leading corporations, and this update to his 1973 classic "Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices" includes his kaleidoscopic take on many of them. Revised by Joseph A. Maciariello to incorporate Drucker's later writings, this version lucidly covers every aspect of management, plus a remarkably diverse array of topics such as nonprofits, service organizations, corporate governance and "knowledge workers" (a term Drucker used to describe white-collar, skilled professionals in the labor force). getAbstract confirms that if you want to learn about management, you cannot do better than Drucker's acknowledged masterpiece. This is the bedrock business book.

This updated edition is relevant now with proven strategies and attitudes toward complete, conscientious, thought,forsight and action in planning for success! "A definite keeper!" Read it and you will know why.

If you want to know about management, study Peter Drucker since all of his philosophies on management can still be utilized in today's modern world whereas others can't really give management a holistic structure.

The reviewer who wrote in Jan 2012 should look on page 125 of the Revised Edition where the exact quote he said was missing can be found. .