Page 254 - The Drucker Lectures

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The Future of the Corporation II

2003

ur topic today is: What are results? And that sounds like a
Overy simple topic, but I’ve been working on it now for quite
some time, and it’s becoming worse and worse and more com-
plicated. And so I hope you will forgive me when I don’t make
sense because there are some areas where I know I don’t make
sense but I haven’t worked my way through.
We have moved into a society of organizations. And what
all of them have in common—maybe more or less for the first
time—is that they have results only on the outside. If one of
you has to go to the hospital, you couldn’t care less whether
the nurses are satisfied. The result you care about is a cured
patient, not a satisfied nurse. And a cured patient is one who
leaves under his own steam and doesn’t come back. That’s a re-
sult. And the same is true of all the organizations in our society
of organizations.
And yet when you look at what we have been writing about
and thinking about in management, including all that I have
done, we have looked really only at the inside. It makes no dif-
ference whether you take an early work like my book The Practice
of Management [published in 1954] or [Harvard Business School
professor] Michael Porter’s books on strategy. They look from
the inside out, and they really talk about organizing the inside
of an organization.

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