Daily Drucker + My Comments

The best way to predict the future is to create it.
-Peter Drucker

Well back at work from Thanksgiving and I am ready to get the week started. Tomorrow will be the first meeting in our Fairfield office and I am really looking forward to it. Let's look back on this post in three years and then look around at our "permanent" office. Goal, done, set!

Daily Drucker + My Comments

What's up? Well before we get to Mr. Drucker I should mention that I am finally taking some steps forward with my business plan. So far my personal plan is in effect and I am looking at it everyday and accomplishing tasks. Now for the LSF business plan I must consolidate my outline into one rough draft and meet with Tom Fujii again to take the next steps. I believe that my plan is a living, working plan that is only one or two steps ahead of my actions and with some long term components.

Today I will prepare for my commercial meeting at Joe's Buffett - Joe owns a few commercial buildings in Fairfield and this is part of my "King of Solano" plan. Oh well that's enough plan talk for the day - now it is time to take action!

Finally - The Daily Drucker:
What the enterprise needs is a principle that gives both the center and the parts genuine managerial functions and powers. This principle is federalism, in which the whole of the enterprise is conceived as made up of autonomous units. The federal enterprise and all its units are in the same business. The same economic factors determine the future of the whole as well as of all units; the same basic decisions have to be made for all of them; the same kind and type of executive is needed. Hence the whole requires a unified management in charge of the basic functions: the decision what business the enterprise is in, the organization of the human resources, and the selection, training, and testing of future leaders.

At the same time, each unit is a business by itself. It produces its own products for a distinct market. Each unit must, therefore, have wide autonomy within limits set by the general decisions of the management of the whole. Each unit has to have its own management. The local management will be primarily an operating management; it will be concerned mainly with the present and immediate future rather than with basic policy. But within a limited scope it will have also to discharge real top-management functions.

The Daily Drucker

The pioneers of management a century ago were right: organizational structure is needed. The modern enterprise needs organization. But the pioneers were wrong in their assumption that there is—or should be— one right organization. Instead of searching for the right organization, management needs to learn to look for, to develop, to test, the organization that fits the task.

There are some “principles” of organization. One is that organization has to be transparent. People have to know and have to understand the organization structure they are supposed to work in. Someone in the organization must have the authority to make the final decision in a given area. It also is a sound principle that authority be commensurate with responsibility. It is a sound principle that any one person in an organization should have only one “master.” These principles are not too different from the ones that inform an architect’s work. They do not tell him what kind of building to build. They tell him what the restraints are. And this is pretty much what the various principles of organization structure do.

Source:
www.druckerinstitute.com

The Daily Drucker

Setting objectives is so important that some of the most effective managers I know have each of their subordinates write a “manager’s letter” twice a year. In this letter to his superior, each manager first defines the objectives of his superior’s job and of his own job as he sees them. He then sets down the performance standards that he believes are being applied to him. Next, he lists the things he must do to attain these goals—and the things within his own unit he considers the major obstacles. He lists the things his superior and the company do that help him and the things that hamper him. Finally, he outlines what he proposes to do during the next year to reach his goals. If his superior accepts this statement, the “manager’s letter” becomes the charter under which the manager operates.

Mutual understanding can never be attained by “communications down,” can never be created by talking. It can result only from “communications up.” It requires both the superior’s willingness to listen and a tool especially designed to make lower managers heard.

Source:
www.druckerinstitute.com