Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

Overview
Peter Drucker's 1973 book maps management as both discipline and practice, binding institutions to results in society. It frames management as a liberal art, integrating economics, psychology, politics, ethics, and history. The central premise is that management converts a group’s energies into performance by focusing on mission, results, and people. Drucker stresses that results occur outside the organization, where customers, users, and citizens live, so managerial focus must always begin with purpose and end with contribution.

The Role of Management
Management’s job is to make human strengths productive and human weaknesses irrelevant. It gives organization to work, sets direction through objectives, and continually adapts to change. It is neither rank nor privilege but responsibility: to set standards, measure performance, and deliver results for customers and society. Drucker insists that any institution, business, hospital, school, government agency, relies on management for effectiveness.

Tasks and Functions
Drucker organizes managerial work around a few core tasks: setting objectives, organizing for performance, motivating and communicating, measuring, and developing people. Objectives convert mission into work and priorities. Organization aligns structure with task, clarifies decisions, and ensures accountability. Measurement provides feedback on whether efforts produce results. Development of people ensures tomorrow’s capacity while achieving today’s goals.

Management by Objectives and Self-Control
A signature contribution is management by objectives and self-control. Clear, jointly set objectives direct managers’ efforts while leaving them free to choose methods. Responsibility is placed where knowledge is, not where the chart says authority sits. This approach requires disciplined goal-setting, transparent measures, and regular reviews. It is antidote to micromanagement and a lever for decentralization.

Organization and Structure
Structure must follow the logic of the work. Drucker contrasts functional, federal (decentralized), and project forms, emphasizing that decentralization to results-focused units increases accountability and adaptability. He warns against organizing around “the available people” or tradition; instead, design should group activities by results, place decision rights with knowledge, and keep spans and reporting lines simple. The chief executive’s task is to balance concentration (few major thrusts) with abandonment (stopping the obsolete).

People and Development
Drucker places managers in the role of people-developers. The rise of knowledge workers makes motivation, assignment based on strengths, and continuous learning central. He urges managers to ask, “What can this person do?” and to design roles for contribution. Staffing for tomorrow requires systematic appraisal, rotation, and placement, and above all the habit of letting people perform.

Information and Decision-Making
Decisions are a process: defining the problem, specifying boundary conditions, thinking through what is “right” before considering compromises, building action into the decision, and feeding back for testing. Controls should be few, focused on meaningful indicators rather than internal busywork. Time is a manager’s scarcest resource, to be audited and allocated to opportunities rather than to trivia.

Innovation, Marketing, and Results
The purpose of business is to create a customer, so marketing and innovation are its two basic functions. Drucker treats innovation as an organized, continuous search for opportunities, not an accident. He emphasizes placing bets on a small number of major opportunities and pruning the rest. Results come from outside, customer satisfaction, utility, and societal outcomes, while internal efficiencies, though necessary, are never sufficient.

Responsibilities and Ethics
Management carries social responsibility: to uphold values, ensure legitimacy, and harmonize the institution’s purpose with society’s needs. Executives must practice prudence, integrity, and stewardship of people and resources. Effective management is judged not by power retained but by performance achieved and successors prepared.