Back to Basics: There Is Nothing So Useless As Doing Efficiently That Which Should Not Be Done At All.

In his article Managing for Business Effectiveness, written in 1963, Peter Ferdinand Drucker suggested that doing well something that should not be done at all will eventually have a negative impact on team motivation and customer satisfaction.

When we’re overwhelmed by activity, facing and tackling many made-up issues, we eventually lose our ability to identify the real problems worth our attention.

Facts: Peter Drucker, was an Austrian-born American management consultant and author, whose published work contributed to the philosophical and practical foundations of the modern business corporation and that has had a decisive influence on several generations of business leaders around the world. He also wrote a book on Japanese painting.

Opinion: In a time of major shifts in our economy, world and reality, when disruptive forces seem to lurk around every corner, some of Drucker’s insights from nearly 60 years ago seem more relevant than ever.

Even though management consulting is usually built on facts (the phrase “fact-based decision” returns more than 500’000 Google results), executives who make effective decisions have always known that they do not start with facts. They start with opinions. The understanding that underlies the right decision often emerges from conflicting and divergent views and grows out of thoughtful consideration of competing alternatives. There are no facts unless one has a criterion of relevance. Decisions about what are useful and useless endeavors are judgments, not a choice between right and wrong. (Drucker, 1973).

Before rushing into facts and raising legions of analysts, let’s try to understand the impact of potential alternatives, and leave space for diversity in our conversations. It will also help us mitigate the impact of our human bias, that we will spread around when feeding carefully chosen and necessarily partial data to AI “black boxes”.

Especially if we wish to to see ourselves as leaders, let’s consider how important it is to do the right things and not solely to do things right (to paraphrase one of Drucker’s most famous sayings).

In 1974, Peter Drucker also suggested that the purpose of strategy is to enable an organization to achieve its desired results in an unpredictable and unforeseeable environment, and he believed that a well-written mission statement was the “foundation for priorities, strategies, plans, and work assignments.” (Drucker, 1974)

To guide our thinking, to help our decision-making and to act sensibly, to embrace useful and qualitative work, let’s refer one more time to Peter Drucker: “Quality in a product or service is not what the supplier puts in. It is what the customer gets out and is willing to pay for. A product is not quality because it is hard to make and costs a lot of money, as manufacturers typically believe. This is incompetence. Customers pay only for what is of use to them and gives them value. Nothing else constitutes quality.” (Drucker, 1986)

Opinion: Let’s start by taking a deep breath and ask ourselves: Are we currently doing — even if efficiently — what should not be done at all? Let’s draw our conclusions and act consequently.

References

Drucker, P. F. (1986). Innovation and Entrepreneurship: Practice and Principles. New York: Harper & Row.

Drucker, P. F. (1974). Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, and Practices. New York: Harper & Row.

Drucker, P. F. (1973). Management: Tasks, Responsibilities. New York : Harper & Row.

Drucker, P. F. (1963). Managing for business effectiveness. Harvard Business Review, 41(3), pp. 53–60.

Greenwood, R. (1981). Management by Objectives: As Developed by Peter Drucker, Assisted by Harold Smiddy. The Academy of Management Review, 6(2), pp. 225–230.

Rosenstein, B. (January 24th, 2019). Living in More Than One World: Peter Drucker on Work/Life. Retrieved from: https://www.amanet.org/articles/living-in-more-than-one-world-peter-drucker-on-work/life/

Wunker, S. (November 4th, 2011). Why Peter Drucker Distrusted Facts. Retrieved from: https://hbr.org/2011/11/why-peter-drucker-distrusted-facts