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The Essential Drucker: The Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker's Essential Writings on Management
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Customer Reviews
Rating:  - A Compilation of Selected Writings
This book takes extracts from ten of Peter Drucker's numerous books and organizes them into three categories: Management, the Individual, and Society. I found the ideas discussed were logically presented and suprisingly straightforward. It seems to be a good summary of his work. As an example, four of the seven chapters of The Effective Executive, which I have also read, were included in this book.
Rating:  - Most of the top pieces of management advice in one book
The chapters in this book are selected from a series of other Drucker books, resulting in a little bit of overlap. However, that one fault doesn't detract from what this is: the premier single-source introduction to management theory and practice. I'd highly advise this to anyone who is worried about improvement for themselves, their teams, and their business. An additional nicety is that each of the chapters are also annotated with their original source so that you can pick up a copy of the original tome if you want to go deeper.
I was particularly impressed by his chapters on personal and team effectivness and on exactly at what stage in business planning you should worry about profitability. The effectiveness advice is dead-on (concentrate periods of productivity, enable your peers and subordinates to do so, and concentrate on work that is useful for your business), and the advice on when to bring profitability into the business product planning mix puts a lot of the short-term profit-first material on its head.
Rating: - The greatest hits of the greatest mind in management.
Peter Drucker is the father of modern management theory and has never been equaled or surpassed in terms of his theories or their usability. The problem with Drucker is that over the course of sixty highly productive years, he's put out more books than it is practical for almost anyone to read. This book addresses that issue for those of us who would like the best parts in one book.
The mark of the finest minds is the ability to clearly and simply articulate ideas that make you wonder "why didn't I think of that?" Once stated, Drucker's ideas are so obvious, but I almost never find any that I came up with on my own and have never put the ideas into words as concisely as he does time after time.
Highly recommended for anyone interested in running a better business. My copy is dog-eared, underlined, marked-up and otherwise worn.
Rating: - The best of his bests.
If you haven't read his previous books, get and read this one. It has the best of the best.
Rating: - Condensed brilliance, which may leave you wishing for more
Peter Drucker has had a truly unique perspective and influence on the development of modern organizational management practices. He is old enough to have known Alfred Sloan of General Motors, and was a studious observer of the rise of the modern corporation, all the way through to its present most advanced state, the post-industrial knowledge-based corporation. Furthermore, Drucker has made major contributions over the decades to management theory and practice, through his books, teaching, consulting, and many articles in publications such as the Harvard Business Review. He has studied a broad span of management topics, from organizational behavior to individual behavior to the impact of organizations and businesses on society. He is even a bit of a futurist. So, who better to have one's life work collected into a single volume, to provide an overview of 20th century management theory?
"The Essential Drucker" (TED) is definitely worth reading, for anyone with a modicum of interest in organizational management. For someone like myself, with a good number of years in business, it served as an excellent refresher course and validated many of my own beliefs about management, and the teachings that I've received through other channels. Drucker's writings are the antithesis of faddish, flaky management theories; he advocates a very solid, non-flashy, heads-down, customer and results focused approach to management that also manages to be humane. There are so many nuggets of wisdom sprinkled throughout TED that I would not be doing justice to the book to highlight only a few of them. One impression that comes across strongly, reading thoughts that Drucker put to paper decades ago, is just how true and applicable they are today.
Having heaped much praise on Drucker and TED, I'm obligated to point out the book's major flaw, which is a function of the way it was put together. Drucker has produced so much writing on so many topics that it is perhaps an impossible task to condense the highlights into a single volume, and still retain anything close to the full force of his arguments. Reading TED, it appears that what most often was edited out (but not always, to be fair) was the evidence (anecdotal or otherwise) in support of his theories. You still get the theories and the declarative statements, but what is often missing is the supporting evidence and examples of the application of the theories, to provide a proper context. A veteran manager can supply these from one's own personal experience, as I was often able to do, but I feel that inexperienced readers, such as the students who Drucker claims are part of the target audience for TED, might struggle with the book.
Given that Drucker and his editor decided to make a single volume rather than two or three, TED is a worthwhile summary of a lifetime's work from a great management thinker, and a decent overall survey of 20th century management theory and practices.
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