Rating: 
Summary: DISCUSSES UNCERTAINITIES OF 21ST CENTURY
Review: If his statement is true: that all "Management is Business Management," then, Mr. Drucker, in this work, provides a potent combination of sage advice, well-researched techniques, business homilies, and perceptive insights into current trends in management in a compact six chapter primer that works well for all organizations.
Those six subjects are: "Management's New Paradigms, Strategy - The New Certainties, The Change Leader, Information Challenges, Knowledge-Worker Productivity, and Managing Oneself." The chapters and subjects build upon each other except for the last - it provides for the human and individual element within the myriad formations of management. Drucker highlights the new certainties for the 21st century and they are profound in their implications for all management. This is the best chapter within the text; Drucker is focused and presents a lucid discussion while avoiding unnecessary distractions. The new certainties are: "1) The Collapsing Birthrate in the Developed World. 2) Shifts in the Distribution of Disposable Income. 3) Defining Performance. 4) Global Competitiveness. 5) The Growing Incongruence Between Economic Globalization and Political Splintering." Another Important point he brings up is Disposable Income. The share of disposable income a customer devotes to purchasing goods is fundamental knowledge any business must know for that factor is "the foundation of all economic information." Drucker attributes growth in the 20th century to four categories: "Government, Health Care, Education, and Leisure." Yet, the lone category providing growth in the 21st century is financial services. This, according to Drucker, has occurred because financial services learned how to market to the average customer. He also states it equally important to know who is not a customer, since this is always a larger population base than known customers. Drucker offers multiple lessons for tomorrow's leaders such as: 'starve problems and feed opportunities' by being willing to abandon old ways of doing things and focusing more on the I of IT, that is, information needed rather than the technology. He points out that we have excellent technology to design a building but that does not inform us about the strategic question of whether or not it should be built. Further, rather than fearing resistance to change we must learn to look for and anticipate change-for this we need change leaders who see opportunities, not threats, in new developments. Drucker summarizes the previous three information revolutions and claims we are experiencing the fourth. This one, driven by changes in accounting procedures and publishing advances will cause all business to learn to organize information. The key to remaining competitive in the 21st century will be to organize based on activity-based costing. Its basic premise is that business is an integrated process that starts when the supplies, material and parts arrive at the plant's loading dock and continues even after the finished product reaches the end-user. Service is still a cost of the product, and so is installation, even if the customer pays. Drucker predicts the new accounting will have its greatest impact on service industries. This paradigm shift should cause the forward thinking manager to evaluate the scarcity of resources. Likewise an organization to be competitive in the 21st century needs to stop thinking regionally or nationally, instead "make global competitiveness a strategic goal." Drucker starts out by providing the reader with his key assumptions underlying management. One set concerns the discipline and the other set the practice of management. These assumptions and their applicability are critical entry points into the following chapters. Drucker shatters the illusion that management is something that only certain people can do in isolation sitting in airconditiojed offices without regard for the task at hand, the product produced, the customer served or the participation of employees.
Rating:
Summary: Words of wisdom
Review: If there is a different way of looking at Management, it is this book.True to his introduction, Drucker makes the reader think about the challenges that lie ahead. His concepts on the role of Information Technology with the ever increasing role of the "I" in IT are likely to have startegic impact on the entire idustry. This book is the Guru's gift to the next generation.
Rating:
Summary: The Book That Shapes The Mind
Review: If you are going to do anything that remotely resembles work or business in the 21st century, let alone live effectively, you have to have a mind that is,in my opinion,adaptive and awake. This book is sufficient catalyst to do just that - to awaken the mind to meet the challenges of the 21st century. I am shaping my personal strategy as an entrepreneur with the information gathered from reading this book. The chapter on Managing Oneself is worth the price of the entire book. Shall I say more? Light is the dissapearance of darkness. Enlightenment is the absence of ignorance. You choose.
Rating: 
Summary: A must read for some Managers.
Review: If you Manage a large firm, be responsible and read it.
Rating:
Summary: Solutions, not mere statements of the obvious
Review: In reading material purporting to help me run my company better today and tomorrow, I have grown tired of hearing the mantra, "change is inevitable so prepare for change." Well, I know that already, so my eyes and mind glaze over when it is encountered. My interest is in learning what the changes might be and ways in which I can better cope with them. While Drucker does use some of the routine statements about change, he correctly identifies some of the changes that are taking place, the affects they will have and how to respond to them in an effective manner.
Drucker identifies what is the most powerful social force working today and some of the consequences, namely the aging of the population in the developed countries. This, coupled with the lowering of the birthrate to the point where the native populations are now declining will change everything in our societal structures. One phenomena that I had not thought of is a consequence of families only having one child. It appears that the parents lavish so much more on the only child that they end up spending more on toys than they would for multiple children. Other, more obvious trends are how to keep the older workers interested, trained and dedicated so that they do not "retire on the job." It is clear that the only way the economies will continue to run without the steady influx of young people is by getting more productivity out of the older ones.
The other main point is the rise to dominance of the knowledge worker and how developing countries are making concerted efforts to create them. In a throwback to Marxist dogma, it means that for the first time the workers own the means of production, namely the knowledge that they carry around. The consequences of this for business management are very profound. In manufacturing, it was possible to monitor progress by simply counting how many widgets were constructed per time frame. If a worker decided to take some time off while on the job, that number dropped. However, for the knowledge worker, similar metrics are difficult if not impossible. While some progress has been made in the area of measuring programmer productivity, it is still much a matter of guesswork. When ten lines of brilliant, bug-free code can be better than one hundred lines of adequate code, such traditional measures such as lines of code cannot be applied. Old style incentives such as bonuses for the production of more widgets also do not apply well to knowledge workers. Incentives such as payments for lines of code or bugs found have almost always ended up with improvements in numbers without an equivalent improvement in quality. Furthermore, incentives to increase the speed just get you a poorer quality product faster. Drucker's treatment of these issues lend his powerful voice to the chorus who describe modern management as the position of an overseer with a tickle stick rather than a whip.
While there are many more challenges facing us in the 21st century than can be described in a book with less than 200 pages, Drucker hits many of the most significant. While there may be times when you will not quite agree with his proposals, they are sensible and you need overwhelming evidence to conclude that they do not apply to you.
Rating:
Summary: Just read it
Review: It's Drucker; just read it. NO more said. If you are in management, you owe it to yourself to read any of his books.
Rating:
Summary: I have lern a lot of this book. I recomend it.
Review: I`m a student of Business and I learn a lot in this book. It has a powerful comparation with the old paradigms of Business
Rating:
Summary: The Most Timely of Peter Drucker's Books
Review: MANAGEMENT CHALLEGES FOR THE 21ST CENTURY is a breakthrough work, even for Peter Drucker. Through 6 impressive essays, Professor Drucker sets the agenda for the next several decades, for every organization and individual. He begins by pointing out that the way most people think about management is all wrong, and immediately needs to be changed. He outlines the needed changes. He then picks the key strategy issues that will strongly affect all organizations for the next 50 years. Next, he points out that we live in turbulent times and that one must lead the changes that one's organization must make so they occur faster than for the competition. There is no choice for any organization, except to fail to survive. From there, he points out that we have information TECHNOLOGY, but very little information worth looking at on the devices the technology brings us. He goes on to define what must be done to create the right information. In a remarkable section, he then tells how to create knowledge worker productivity (something he has said in the past that no one knows how to do). Finally, he provides a remarkable essay on how to get the most out of yourself, for yourself. These essays were previewed in leading publications, and substantially improved from the originals. There is no repetition of his work and thinking from earlier books. This is like finding a whole new Peter Drucker. I especially loved the new examples that he included, as well as his historical references that only Peter Drucker can make. YOU ARE MAKING A BIG MISTAKE IF YOU FAIL TO BUY, READ, AND APPLY THE IMPORTANT LESSONS OF THIS BOOK. If you read only one book by Peter Drucker, read this one! I was especially pleased to see that he addressed the stalls that delay organizational progress such as the old habits reinforced by tradition, unwillingness to address the new through disbelief, poor communications at all levels (he states the rules that you must follow to be a better communicator and be more effective), needless interactions fostering mindless bureaucracy, the temptation to procrastinate (standing still in front of a truck about to run you over is a mistake you will not repeat), avoiding the unattractive key issues of your organiztion (he recommends doing the dirty jobs yourself for several weeks a year in order to understand how to improve), and failing to set high standards. As always, the book is filled with powerful questions that you can answer for yourself in order to accomplish much, much more and feel great while you do so. Read and apply the lessons of this book and you will have many more 2,000 percent solutions (achieving 20 times the usual results with the same resources or getting the same results 20 times faster).
Rating:
Summary: A profound blueprint for the future of our management career
Review: Mr. Drucker's in-depth analysis is unsurpassed both in its common sense and significance for the executive of any age and/or responsibility. The author's exceptional communicating ability makes the lecture of this book a wonderful intellectual exercise for all of us in management.
Rating:
Summary: Pole Stars for Strategic Thinking and Personal Planning
Review: One of the most powerful ways that we all learn is by analogy to our own lives, and Peter Drucker has done his best job ever at providing those analogies. For example, he refers to the leadership model of a volunteer organization as the preferred way to lead knowledge workers, as well. Almost all of us have been or seen someone who effectively led volunteers. The other great way to learn is to answer questions, and this book is full of them. In fact, it is almost like getting two books: a book and a workbook. Like many of his recent books, this book is organized into essays, except these are much longer than most and provide more detail. One thing I liked about this book was the way that he pointed out what was going to be different in the next century from the current one. Although all of these changes are well underway, their pervasiveness will grow greatly so that they will replace many existing issues in importance. My experience with his past books has been that they are excellent at pointing our thinking in the right direction for decades, and I believe he has done it again. Although some of these themes will be familiar from othe reading or other Drucker books, what will be new is much more detail about what to do differently. Some may feel that they already "get the message" but I doubt if anyone has already "gotten all the messages" he presents here. You owe it to yourself to check your thinking by testing with this book.
|
