The Frontiers of Management by Peter Drucker

Author:Peter Drucker
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2012-09-09T14:00:00+00:00

But also management must not accept “responsibility” if by doing so it harms and impedes what is its first duty: the economic performance of the enterprise. This is equally irresponsible.

But beyond these caveats there is a no-man's-land where we do not even fully understand what the right questions are. The problems of New York, for instance, are in no way caused by business. They were largely caused by public policies business had warned against and fought against: primarily by rent control, which, as it always does, destroys the very housing the poor need, that is, decent, well-maintained older housing; by demagogic welfare policies; and by equally demagogic labor-relations policies. And yet when New York City was on the verge of self-destruction, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a small group of senior executives of major New York business enterprises mobilized the business community to reverse the downward slide and to renew New York City—people like Austin Tobin of the Port of New York Authority; David Rockefeller of the Chase Manhattan Bank; Walter Wriston and William Spencer of Citibank; Felix Rohatyn of Lazard Frères, the private bankers; the top management of Pfizer, a pharmaceutical company; and several others. They did this not by “taking responsibility” for things they lacked competence in, for example, the problems of the black ghetto. They did it by doing what they were highly competent to do: they started and led the most dramatic architectural development of any major city since Napoleon III had created a new Paris and Francis Joseph a new Vienna a hundred years earlier. The black ghetto is still there, and so are all the ills associated with it, for example, crime on the streets. But the city has been revitalized.

And this did not happen because these businesses and their managements needed the city; excepting only the Port of New York Authority, they could all have moved out, as a good many of their colleagues—IBM, for instance, or General Electric, or Union Carbide—were doing. These businesses and their top managements acted because the city needed them, though, of course, they benefited in the end if only because a business —and any other institution—does better in a healthy rather than a diseased social environment.

Is there a lesson in this? There surely is a challenge.

Altogether, for management of the big business to attain full legitimacy, it will have to accept that to remain “private” it has to accept that it discharges a social, and that means a “public,” function.

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