The proxy

Drucker took a doctorate in international law at Frankfurt, left Germany in 1933 and reached the United States in 1937. His first book, The End of Economic Man (1939), analysed the appeal of fascism. Invited to study General Motors from the inside, he wrote Concept of the Corporation (1946), and spent the post-war decades, at New York University and from 1971 at Claremont, explaining the large organisation and the rise of work done with knowledge rather than hands.

• 1954 · The Practice of Management

  The purpose of a business

  A business exists to create a customer. Its results lie outside it, in the market and in society, so marketing and innovation are its two basic functions.

• 1954 · The Practice of Management

  Management by objectives

  Managers should be directed by objectives they help to set, and should measure their own performance against them rather than be controlled from above.

• 1959 · Landmarks of Tomorrow

  The knowledge worker

  A growing share of work is done with knowledge rather than hands, and making that work productive would become the central task of management.

• 1966 · The Effective Executive

  Effectiveness

  Effectiveness means doing the right things, and it can be learned: know where your time actually goes, focus on contribution, build on strengths and do first things first.

• 1967 · The Effective Decision

  Decisions start with disagreement

  A good decision starts from competing opinions rather than from facts, and needs dissent: when everyone agrees at once, the problem has probably not been understood.

1. What result matters, and who is responsible for achieving it?
2. What result, outside the organisation, would show this worked?
3. Who is accountable for it, by name, and by when?
4. Is this doing things right, or doing the right things?

Organisational effectiveness is not the only public value. Management by objectives can turn into managing the numbers; W. Edwards Deming argued that targets distort the work they are meant to measure.