I’ve always thought that Peter Drucker is the only writer one could legitimately call a “management guru” (though Charles Handy runs him close). So it’s nice to come on this essay in the current edition of the Economist. Excerpt:

The world’s great business schools have replaced Oxbridge as the nurseries of the global elite. The management-consulting industry will earn revenues of $300 billion this year. Management books regularly top the bestseller lists. Management gurus can command $60,000 a speech.

Yet the practitioners of this great industry continue to suffer from a severe case of status anxiety. This is partly because the management business has always been prey to fads and fraudsters. But it is also because the respectable end of the business seems to lack what Yorkshire folk call “bottom”. Consultants and business-school professors are forever discovering great ideas, like re-engineering, that turn to dust, and wonderful companies, like Enron, that burst into flames.

Peter Drucker is the perfect antidote to such anxiety. He was a genuine intellectual who, during his early years, rubbed shoulders with the likes of Ludwig Wittgenstein, John Maynard Keynes and Joseph Schumpeter. He illustrated his arguments with examples from medieval history or 18th-century English literature. He remained at the top of his game for more than 60 years, advising generations of bosses and avoiding being ensnared by fashion. He constantly tried to relate the day-to-day challenges of business to huge social and economic trends such as the rise of “knowledge workers” and the resurgence of Asia.

But Drucker was more than just an antidote to status anxiety. He was also an apostle for management. He argued that management is one of the most important engines of human progress: “the organ that converts a mob into an organisation and human effort into performance”.

From The Onion.

LOS ANGELES—As the White House considers sweeping strategic shifts in the war in Afghanistan, heroin addicts across the nation called on President Obama Monday to stick with the current U.S. policy, which has flooded the world market with low-price narcotics. “There’s no need to change nothing, Joe Biden,” said addict Reginald ‘Bones’ Dillow, who, when conscious, is an outspoken proponent of the U.S. military strategy that has resulted in a nearly 40-fold increase in Afghan opium production since the end of Taliban rule in 2001. “Everything is so cheap—it’s all totally fine like it is, right? Over there, I mean. Why would you want to…do the…[garbled].” Obama is reportedly looking into economic incentives that would both persuade poor Afghans to cease opium cultivation and benefit chemically dependent Americans, the most promising of which involves constructing facilities in the war-torn country for the manufacture of methadone.

From David Isenberg’s classic essay — “The Rise of the Stupid Network”…

Former Shell Group Planning Head, Arie deGeus, in his master work, The Living Company (Harvard, Boston, 1997), examined thousands of companies to try to discover what it takes to adapt to changing conditions. He found that the life expectancy of the average company was only 40 years – this means that telephone company culture is in advanced old age. De Geus also studied 27 companies that had been able to survive over 100 years. He concluded that managing for longevity – to maximize the chances that a company will adapt to changes in the business climate – is very different than managing for profit. For example, in the former, employees are part of a larger, cohesive whole, a work community. In the latter, employees are ‘resources’ to be deployed or downsized as business dictates.

This is interesting in the context of the Google Book Agreement, the responsibilities of academic libraries in the area of digital preservation and curation and the Arcadia Project. When people say to me (about digitisation) “Why not let Google [rather than, say, the University Library] do it?” I ask them to name commercial companies that have been around for 800 years.