The test of any policy in management … is not whether the answer is right or wrong, but whether it works.
The GM executives believed that they had discovered principles and that those principles were absolutes, like laws of nature. I, by contrast, have always held that principles of this kind, being man-made, are at best heuristic. This has been the one point on which my approach to management has always differed from that of the writers or theoreticians on the subject—and the reason, perhaps, that I have never been quite respectable in the eyes of academia. I do believe that there are basic values, especially human ones. But I do not believe that there is “one correct answer.” There are answers that have a high probability of being the wrong ones—at least to the point where one does not even try them unless all else has failed. But the test of any policy in management or in any other social discipline is not whether the answer is right or wrong, but whether it works. Management, I have always believed, is not a branch of theology but, at bottom, a clinical discipline. The test, as in the practice of medicine, is not whether the treatment is “scientific” but whether the patient recovers.
ACTION POINT: List three “rules of thumb” you have found helpful for improving performance. Cite a “textbook principle” that has not worked for you.
Concept of the Corporation
* Source: The Daily Drucker by Peter F. Drucker