Book Review: On the Profession of Management

Another excellent Peter Drucker book, this one is a collection of some of his most important articles previously published in the Harvard Business Review.

Here are some paraphrased noteworthy quotes from the book:

"A decision without an action is just a good intention"

"Build the execution of the decision into the decision itself" pg. 30

"The future can be shaped by purposeful action" pg. 43

"Direct resources and efforts towards opportunities for economically significant results" pg. 67

"Resources tend to be erroneously allocated by transaction instead of results, by what is difficult instead of productive, by yesterday's problems rather than by today's and tomorrow's opportunities" pg. 69-70

In a previous post reviewing the book Confronting Reality, I mentioned that I had noticed parallels between Drucker's business model related to confronting reality and the model presented by the Confronting Reality authors. I happened to read these two books back to back and it struck me how similar the basic premise of the models was. This led me to wonder how much on the topic of business models is original and how much has been inspired by Peter Drucker's writings on the subject.

Drucker's calls his model a Theory of Business and it's composed of 4 specifications:
1. The assumptions about environment, mission, and core competencies must fit reality (sound familiar?)
2. The assumptions in all the areas have to fit one another
3. The theory of the business must be known and understood throughout the organization
4. The theory of the business has to be tested constantly

Next, I'm working on his autobiography, "Adventures of a Bystander"!