Technology Changes, Good Management Doesn’t
I’ve always loved the contrast between Moore’s Law – Gordon Moore’s pronouncement that silicon chips’ power would double every 18 months – and Peter Drucker’s much more sober statement about the art of managing people: “We are not going to breed a new race of supermen. We will have to run our organizations with people as they are.” Together they capture the difference between technological progress, which in certain periods occurs exponentially, and the “progress” we make in changing human nature — which is to say, no progress at all.
Because human nature doesn’t change, the fundamental art and science of managing human beings doesn’t change either – but you wouldn’t know it from reading the popular business press. Signs of misguided attempts at the Mooreification of management are everywhere: in the perpetually unfulfilled promises of the $14 billion leadership industry, in the current #1 management bestseller offering “life changing magic,” and in the never-ending parade of management “revolutions” that pledge quantum leaps in managerial effectiveness.
This is not to say that managers today should be doing exactly the same things they did 100 years ago. When the purposes, processes, and technologies of work change, we need to make some change in how we manage. But these changes should be to management’s tactics, not its basic function.
“[J]ust as the essence of medicine is not urinalysis (important though that is), the essence of management is not techniques and procedures,” wrote Drucker. “The essence of management is to make [people and their expertise] productive. Management, in other words, is a social function.”
Managerial effectiveness today is, as it has ever been, based on management engaging the three tasks that Drucker identified as uniquely its own: Focusing the organization on its specific purpose and mission; making work both productive and suitable for human beings; and taking responsibility for the organization’s social impacts.
This list is not new. It is old, which is exactly the point: These tasks have been tested by time and experience, through all manner of social and technological upheavals.
If these are the tasks, then here are the action items:
Social problems, however, can be converted into valuable organizational opportunities. Because every organization exists to meet a social purpose, the dawn of a new social challenge can also signal the arrival of a valuable new chance to create a customer, change a life or express a community’s vision.
When management stops chasing silver bullets and instead embraces its essential tasks, it will eventually come to some profound questions: When an organization’s mission becomes outmoded, what should it do? Amidst the rise of machine intelligence, where is the value in human work? And in a sick society, what is the role of a healthy business?
These are more than just questions of profit or productivity. They are also questions of community, morality and the meaning of human life. Which is exactly why they belong to management, the consummate social function.
Technology Changes, Good Management Doesn’t
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