Management Challenges For The 21st Centuryby Peter F. Drucker (Butterworth Heinemann, 1999 In his introduction, Drucker advises on the use of this book: read a chapter at a time, ask "What do these challenges mean for me and my organisation?", think through what actions to take to turn the challenges into opportunities, and THEN GO TO WORK. The call to make connections and take action is a helpful way into a text that acknowledges that growth in developed countries lies in the nonprofit social sector, yet mainly uses examples from large scale business. Drucker explodes outdated assumptions about the nature and purpose of management and proposes a set of new paradigms which have a generic application. These include recognising that the only right form of organisation is one that fits the task and that management's task is to lead people to make productive the specific strengths and knowledge of each individual. Management policy must be based on customer values; management's concern and responsibility is everything that affects the performance of the organisation and its results. For the arts practitioner or manager, certain chapters have more resonance than others. For instance, "The Change Leader" offers salutary advice for all those arts organisations and funding bodies that seem to spend all their time re-organising, attempting to manage change rather than anticipate it. The chapters on improving the productivity of knowledge-workers - the new capital assets - and on managing oneself are also particularly interesting, given the predominant working patterns of our sector. There is practical advice about self-management and self-development in the context of the expectation that workers will outlive the life of their employing organisation, or at least see it radically change in structure or the work in which it is engaged. This is a book to gain much from: a swift history of management theorists; fascinating insights into some of the key business leaders and politicians of the last century; a reasoned response to the major certainties of this century in terms of the falling birthrate in the developed world, shifts in the distribution of disposable income and global competitiveness; and, above all, a consideration of how to apply ourselves as we create the society of the 21st century.
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