Office-types

Why I love Peter Drucker:

'Increasing effectiveness may well be the only area where we can hope significantly to raise the level of the knowledge worker's performance, achievement, and satisfaction.

We certainly could use people of much greater abilities in many places. We could use people of broader knowledge. I submit, however, that in these two areas, not too much can be expected from further efforts. We may be getting to the point where we are already attempting to do the inherently impossible or at least the inherently unprofitable. But we are not going to breed a new race of supermen. We will have to run our organisations with men and women as they are.

The books on manager development, for instance, envisage truly a "man for all seasons" in their picture of "the manager of tomorrow." A senior executive, we are told, should have extraordinary abilities as an analyst and a decision-maker. He or she should be good at working with people and at understanding organisation and power relations, be good at mathematics, and have artistic insights and creative imagination. What seems to be wanted is universal genius, and universal genius has always been in scarce supply. The experience of the human race indicates strongly that the only person in abundant supply is the universal incompetent....

...When "operations research" first came in, several of the brilliant young practitioners published their prescription for the operations researcher of tomorrow. They always came out asking for a polymath knowing everything and capable of doing superior and original work in every area of human knowledge. According to one of these studies, operations researchers need to have advanced knowledge in sixty-two or so major scientific and humanistic disciplines. If such a person could be found, he would, I am afraid, be totally wasted on studies of inventory levels or on the programming of production schedules.'

How do we get past this?

Read "Effectiveness Must be Learned", The Essential Drucker.