Whoever makes two blades of grass grow where only one grew before deserves better of mankind than any speculative philosopher or metaphysical system builder.
Management will remain a basic and dominant institution perhaps as long as Western civilization itself survives. For management is not only grounded in the nature of the modern industrial system and in the needs of modern business enterprise, to which an industrial system must entrust its productive resources, both human and material. Management also expresses the basic beliefs of modern Western society. It expresses the belief in the possibility of controlling man’s livelihood through the systematic organization of economic resources. It expresses the belief that economic change can be made into the most powerful engine for human betterment and social justice—that, as Jonathan Swift first overstated it three hundred years ago, whoever makes two blades of grass grow where only one grew before deserves better of mankind than any speculative philosopher or metaphysical system builder.
Management—which is the organ of society specifically charged with making resources productive, that is, with the responsibility for organized economic advance—therefore reflects the basic spirit of the modern age. It is, in fact, indispensable, and this explains why, once begotten, it grew so fast and with so little opposition.
ACTION POINT: Come up with a few examples of why management, its competence, its integrity, and its performance, is so decisive to the free world.
The Practice of Management
* Source: The Daily Drucker by Peter F. Drucker