What Management Is: How It Works and Why It's Everyone's Business - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Joan Magretta, M.B.A., Ph.D., is an award-winning contributor to the Harvard Business Review, where she was the strategy editor during the 1990s. Before that she was a partner at Bain & Company, a leading management consulting firm.

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Introduction: The Universal Discipline

From the outside, business can look like "a seemingly mindless game of chance at which any donkey could win provided only that he be ruthless. But that is of course how any human activity looks to the outsider unless it can be shown to be purposeful, organized, systematic; that is unless it can be presented as the generalized knowledge of a discipline."

-- Peter F. Drucker

What were the most important innovations of the past century? Antibiotics and vaccines that doubled, or even tripled, human life spans? Automobiles and airplanes that redefined our idea of distance? New agents of communication, like the telephone and the television, or the chips, computers, and networks that are propelling us into a new economy?

All of these innovations transformed our lives, yet none of them could have taken hold so rapidly or spread so widely without another. That innovation is the discipline of management, the accumulating body of thought and practice that makes organizations work. When we take stock of the productivity gains that drive our prosperity, technology gets all of the credit. In fact, management is doing a lot of the heavy lifting.

The human ability to manage, to organize purposefully, is as characteristic of the species -- and probably as old -- as the opposable thumb. But the discipline of management is new. Its roots can be traced to the mid-nineteenth century. Its coming of age as a discipline, however, is an unfolding event of our lifetime. During the past several decades, management has discovered its true genius -- turning complexity and specialization into performance. Even free agents owe their freedom to management's ability to make their specialized contributions productive.

One sign of this coming of age is the explosion of yearly M.B.A. graduates. In the United States, the number grew from just five thousand in 1960 to roughly one hundred thousand by the year 2000. Over the same period, what began as a trickle of writing about management has turned into a flood. Despite this sea of words -- or maybe because the volume is so overwhelming -- most people are more confused than ever about what management is, and the popular conception has a lot of catching up to do with the advancing state of the discipline.

As editors of the Harvard Business Review, we had front-row seats at the floodgates. Our mission was to help a wide audience of practicing managers and professionals gain access to the ideas of specialists who normally spoke to a narrow circle of insiders. We asked every author who they wanted to reach and why that reader would be better off as a result. We listened for the punchline or, in our shorthand, the so-what. Now it's our turn to answer those questions.

Most management books are for managers only. This one is for everyone -- for the simple reason that, today, all of us live in a world of management's making. Whether we realize it or not, every one of us stakes our well-being on the performance of management. If we want to make better choices about the organizations we join, support, invest in, or start, we must know concretely what management is, and when it is good or bad. If we want to make smarter choices about our own careers -- how we can translate our talents into performance, what we do that causes us to succeed or fail -- we need to apply the discipline of management to ourselves. If we want better communities and a better world for our children, we need a clear-headed understanding of how management performs in the nonprofit sector, and how the discipline can be properly applied to fields such as education and health care.

Wherever our needs exceed our resources, we need management. Wherever we work or volunteer, we need management. Doing well in today's world -- and even doing good -- requires that we all learn to think like managers, even if that's not what we're called.

Unlike most other professions -- law or medicine or accounting, for example -- you don't need a license to practice management. In fact, it's the only field we can think of where practice precedes formal training. The Harvard Business School, for example, has traditionally required students to work before they will be considered for admission to the M.B.A. program. What you get from the education, the theory goes, will depend in part on the experience you bring to it.

The same will be true of this book.

Newcomers to the field will find an inviting, jargon free introduction to the basics. This is a book about a set of powerful ideas, but it conveys those ideas concretely, through stories about real people and organizations. If you find, as we do, that those stories are interesting, the book will give you a richer appreciation of the breadth and the difficulty of management's work. Looked at from a distance, it's easy to think that management is only about economics and engineering but, up close, it's very much about people. Rightly understood, management is a liberal art, drawing freely from all the disciplines that help us make sense of ourselves and our world. That's ultimately why it is work worth doing -- and so hard to do well.

Readers with more experience will find a different so-what. The book offers a concise synthesis of important ideas and practices -- for example, value creation, business models, competitive strategy, the 80-20 rule, performance metrics, decision analysis. We believe that these, and the many other ideas that constitute the core of the discipline, are meant to be used. We present them in a way that will help readers apply them across a broad spectrum of managerial and professional work, in commercial organizations and nonprofits. For those who find the language of management to be more of a barrier than an aid to understanding, think of this book as everything you wanted to know about management but were afraid to ask.

Readers who bring the most sophistication to this book will get something different, a framework for stepping back and seeing the big picture, as well as a clear articulation of important, but often unwritten, rules. They may also gain some insight into their own organization's performance and their own practice as managers. They will find, we hope, that, although this is a book about the basics, the basics aren't always obvious.

A Discipline Often Misunderstood

The emergence of a discipline propels any field forward. Society has always had managers, using the word loosely, to refer to people in positions of institutional power, such as owners and overseers. In the same way, we've always had doctors. However, until medicine became a codified discipline that could be taught, practiced, and improved upon, we didn't expect much from them. Today, there are better doctors and worse ones -- individual practitioners differ --...