Peter Drucker's Definition of Management + Its Purpose

This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "The Essential Drucker" by Peter Drucker. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.

Like this article? Sign up for a free trial here.

How does Peter Drucker define management? How do you define your company’s mission?

In The Essential Drucker by Peter Drucker, management is defined as the practice of enabling groups of people with different knowledge, skills, and backgrounds to work together toward a common goal. This goal is often the company’s mission that either you or a higher-up is responsible for creating.

Keep reading to learn more about the responsibilities of managers in an organization.

What Is Management?

The first thing you need to know is Peter Drucker’s management definition, its purpose, and its scope. More than any other part of an organization, management is directly responsible for whether the organization’s efforts produce its desired results. Drucker writes that managers, both at the highest level and all the way down, do this by articulating an enterprise’s mission, spelling out its objectives, and developing its people’s strengths to maximize their individual contributions.

Though political, military, and religious leaders have existed for thousands of years, Drucker traces the start of modern “management” to the period of industrialization beginning in the late 1800s. Before then, workers were largely unskilled and relied on a taskmaster’s orders—a much more authoritarian system than what we think of as management today. With the growth of subject-specific expertise and a workforce of laborers with a variety of skills, a new specialty emerged—that of coordinating large groups of people to work toward a unified purpose. Today, people who make management decisions comprise more than a third of the workforce. For this reason, learning management skills is now a requirement in nearly every line of work.

(Shortform note: Drucker expresses a linear view of the development of management as a profession over time, but in Reinventing Organizations, Frederic Laloux describes the changing role of management as a series of exponential paradigm shifts across human history, from the authoritarian structures of the past to contemporary corporate power structures. These new organizational paradigms replace many aspects of the older managerial models while encapsulating and massively building on their strengths. Beyond that, Laloux suggests that in emerging and future organizations, “managers” as we know them will no longer exist, with their duties and managerial skills distributed throughout the organization.)

Peter Drucker’s Definition of Management + Its Purpose