36 tweets of Peter Drucker on the Nonprofits and the Management’s New Paradigms

(From the book: Peter F. Drucker, “The Essential Drucker”, Collins Business Essentials, 2009)

1. In two areas, strategy and the effectiveness of the board, nonprofit organizations are practicing what most American businesses only preach (39)
2. The nonprofits are, of course, still dedicated to “doing good.” But they also realize that good intentions are no substitute for organization and leadership, for accountability, performance, and results (40)
3. The successful nonprofits have learned to define clearly what changes outside the organization constitute “results” and to focus on them (42)
4. Effective use of the board requires a clear mission, careful placement and continual learning and teaching, management by objectives and self- control, high demands but corresponding responsibility, and accountability for performance and results (50)
5. The modern organization exists to provide a specific service to society. It therefore has to be in society. It has to be in a community, has to be a neighbor, has to do its work within a social setting. But also, it has to employ people to do its work. Its social impacts inevitably go beyond the specific contribution it exists to make (51)
6. A healthy business, a healthy university, a healthy hospital cannot exist in a sick society. Management has a self- interest in a healthy society, even though the cause of society’s sickness is none of management’s making (52)
7. A healthy business and a sick society are hardly compatible. Healthy businesses require a healthy, or at least a functioning, society. The health of the community is a prerequisite for successful and growing business (57)
8. But managers, and especially managers of key institutions of society, are not being paid to be heroes to the popular press. They are being paid for performance and responsibility (59)
9. The manager who fails to think through and work for the appropriate solution to an impact of his business because it makes him “unpopular in the club” knowingly does harm (66)
10. A natural science deals with the behavior of objects. But a social discipline such as management deals with the behavior of people and human institutions (70)
11. Management is not business management— any more than, say, medicine is obstetrics (72)
12. Mission defines strategy, after all, and strategy defines structure (72)
13. There surely are differences in managing a chain of retail stores and managing a Catholic diocese (though amazingly fewer than either chain stores or bishops might believe) (72)
14. It has become clear that organization is not an absolute. It is a tool for making people productive in working together (73)
15. “Hierarchy,” and the unquestioning acceptance of it by everyone in the organization, is the only hope in a crisis (74)
16. If the ship goes down, the captain does not call a meeting, the captain gives an order (73)
17. Other situations within the same institution require deliberation. Others still require teamwork— and so on (74)
18. There is wisdom to the old proverb of the Roman law that a slave who has three masters is a free man (75)
19. Instead of searching for the right organization, management needs to learn to look for, to develop, to test different people have to be managed differently (77)
20. Knowledge workers are not subordinates; they are “associates.” (77)
21. That they know more about their job than anybody else in the organization is part of the definition of knowledge workers (78).
22. An increasing number of people who are full- time employees have to be managed as if they were volunteers. They are paid, to be sure. But knowledge workers have mobility. They can leave. They own their “means of production,” which is their knowledge (80)
23. What motivates— and especially what motivates knowledge workers— is what motivates volunteers (80)
24. Volunteers, we know, have to get more satisfaction from their work than paid employees, precisely because they do not get a paycheck. They need, above all, challenge (80)
25. Different groups in the work population have to be managed differently (80)
26. Increasingly “employees” have to be managed as “partners”— and it is the definition of a partnership that all partners are equal (80)
27. Increasingly, therefore, the management of people is a “marketing job.” And in marketing one does not begin with the question, What do we want? One begins with the questions, What does the other party want? What are its values? What are its goals? What does it consider results? (80)
28. One does not “manage” people. The task is to lead people. And the goal is to make productive the specific strengths and knowledge of each individual (82)
29. Very few institutions know anything about the noncustomers— very few of them even know that they exist, let alone know who they are (…) it is with the noncustomers that changes always start (86)
30. The scope of management is not legal. It has to be operational. It has to embrace the entire process. It has to be focused on results and performance across the entire economic chain (89)
31. Management and entrepreneurship are only two different dimensions of the same task. An entrepreneur who does not learn how to manage will not last long. A management that does not learn to innovate will not last long (92)
32. Business— and every other organization today— has to be designed for change as the norm and to create change rather than react to it (92)
33. Management must focus on the results and performance of the organization (93)
34. The first task of management is to define what results and performance are in a given organization— and this, as anyone who has worked on it can testify, is in itself one of the most difficult, one of the most controversial, but also one of the most important tasks (93)
35. Management exists for the sake of the institution’s results. It has to start with the intended results and has to organize the resources of the institution to attain these results. It is the organ to make the institution, whether business, church, university, hospital, or a battered women’s shelter, capable of producing results outside of itself (93)
36. Management is the specific tool, the specific function, the specific instrument to make institutions capable of producing results (94)

Peter F. Drucker

The Essential Drucker

Collins Business Essentials, 2009