Page 182 - The Drucker Lectures

The Knowledge Worker and the Knowledge Society [ 163

All of them require an organ that thinks through strategies—
that is, the means through which the goals of the organization
become performance. All of them have to define the values of
the organization: its system of rewards and punishments, and its
spirit and its culture. In all of them, managers need both the
knowledge of management as work and discipline and the knowl-
edge and understanding of the organization itself—its purposes,
its values, its environment and markets, its core competencies.
Management as a practice is very old. The most successful
executive in all history was surely that Egyptian who, 4,000
years ago or more, first conceived the pyramid without any prec-
edent, designed and built it, and did so in record time. Unlike
any other work of man, that first pyramid still stands. But as a
discipline, management is barely 50 years old. It was first dimly
perceived around the time of World War I. It did not emerge un-
til World War II, and then primarily in the United States. Since
then, it has been the fastest-growing new function, and its study
the fastest-growing new discipline. No function in history has
emerged as fast as management, and surely none has had such
worldwide sweep in such a short period.
Management, in most business schools, is still taught as a
bundle of techniques—budgeting or organization development.
To be sure, management, like any other work, has its own tools
and its own techniques. But just as the essence of medicine is not
the urine analysis, the essence of management is not technique or
procedure. The essence of management is to make knowledges
productive. Management, in other words, is a social function.
And, in its practice, management is truly a liberal art.

From the Edwin L. Godkin Lecture at Harvard University.