Playing To Win
Management Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices & Playing to Win
Utility & Compatibility
Brendan, fellow Peter Drucker aficionado, friend, and former colleague, asked me to do a piece on Drucker’s classic Management Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, as I have done previously with books such as Blue Ocean Strategy and Business Model Generation. I am happy to once again take Brendan’s sage advice and this Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights piece is called Management Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices & Playing to Win: Utility & Compatibility. And as always, you can find all the previous PTW/PI here.
The Book
I hadn’t read Management Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (hereafter MTRP for short) since early 1990s and because much of my library was left behind when I departed Monitor and again when I left Rotman, I needed a copy and asked my assistant to get one for me. When I started reading it, something felt wrong. It sounded too politically correct and modern. Though I had an aging memory of it, having read it over 30 years earlier, it wasn’t what I remembered. Then I realized — and should have before diving in — that I was reading a revised edition, published in 2008, three years after Drucker’s death.
So, I tracked down a 1st edition, published in 1973, and started over again. Unlike the revision I had started to read, the original is flat-out brilliant, packed full of absolute wisdom across its 800+ pages. On utility, it is an A+!
Based on this experience, I issue this heartfelt request: Please don’t, after my death, revise, modernize and ‘improve’ my work. I don’t want someone deciding what I meant to say and saying it ‘better.’ No, no, no. Please.
Not many of you have or will get the hard-to-find 1st edition. I had to buy it from a rare book seller. Nonetheless, I will put the 1st edition page numbers in below as a reference.
Strategy in MTRP
In reading MTRP, it was clear that it was written at an interesting time in the history of strategy. As I have written before, there was a long tradition of strategy as long-range planning. Then in 1963, Bruce Henderson had a big impact on the field with the founding of Boston Consulting Group and creation of some of the seminal concepts in strategy. But this book was written during the nascent period in which strategy began to be distinguished from long-range planning, years before Michael Porter and Competitive Strategy in 1980.
For much of the book, strategy and long-range planning are used largely synonymously. For example, Chapter 10 (121–129) is titled “Strategic Planning,” but immediately launches into a discussion of long-range planning for three pages. Across MTRP, strategy is often used together with planning — “strategies and plans,” (611) or strategy as a “systematic plan.” (743)
But then almost out of nowhere, late in the book, in discussing strategy for small business, Drucker describes the object of strategy as “a specific ecological niche in which it has an advantage and can withstand competition.” (649) He might as well be using Where-to-Play (WTP) for the niche part and How-to-Win (HTW) for the ecological part. Still later (668–670) in a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of the strategies of American Motors, Volkswagen, Courtaulds, and Celanese Corporation, he evaluates their respective implicit WTP/HTW decisions and the strategic consequences thereof.
Clearly there wasn’t a developed language for strategy yet — for example, mine didn’t come along until 20 years later. At the time of MTRP, Drucker was in the middle of the migration from the language of long-range planning to the language of strategy. But he clearly recognized a thing called strategy and its importance. And his conception of strategy shines through, especially towards the end of the book.
In the end, MTRP and Playing to Win are highly compatible on strategy and for me, rereading the former gave me a very cool snapshot of an important time of transition in my field.
Multiple Compatibilities
In addition to the topic of strategy, MTRP and Playing to Win are highly compatible across too many things to fully enumerate, but I will highlight a few striking ones.
Strategy as an Integrative Task
Drucker describes strategy as an integrative task on numerous occasions in the book (e.g. 43, 47, 64, 395, 398), not a list of initiatives as most ‘strategic’ planning is. It helped me appreciate why he loved what I was doing on integrative thinking at Rotman and gave the school the ultimate pull quote of all time when he declared in a June 12, 2002 speech (at the 5:50 mark): “What you at the Rotman School, under Dean Martin’s leadership, are doing may be the most important thing happening in management education today.”
Strategy & Marketing
I believe that strategy and marketing have converged so much that they are virtually the same thing. Drucker’s view is not dissimilar: “Marketing is so basic that it cannot be considered a separate function…it is, first, a central dimension of the entire business…Concern and responsibility for marketing must, therefore, permeate all areas of the enterprise.” (63) His description of marketing is virtually identical to my description of strategy — as the ultimate integrative function of business.
Strategy & Execution
I hold the exceedingly unpopular view that the distinction between strategy and execution is false and unhelpful because managers need to make important decisions throughout the organization — and those decisions aren’t meaningfully different in their structure and character then top management ‘strategic decisions.’ Drucker, unlike most, agrees — and I will take that single agreement over the many people who don’t: “In the knowledge organization, top management can no longer assume that the “operating people” do as they are being told. It has to accept that the middle ranks make genuine decisions.” (452)
Analytics/Management Science
In a sub-section of Chapter 40 titled “Why Management Science Fails to Perform” (508–511), Drucker takes a view as dim as mine of the application of scientific analysis to business. That is nice to see and highly compatible.
Later in the same chapter, Drucker gets downright Aristotelian arguing: “There are no “solutions” with respect to the future. There are only choices between courses of action, each imperfect, each risky, each uncertain, and each requiring different efforts and involving different costs.” (515) Again, that totally parallels my view on how businesspeople need to think about the future. Interestingly, in the book Drucker never references Aristotle — who is my favorite philosopher of all time. I would have thought he would love Aristotle — by far the most practical of the Greek philosophers, but I never thought to ask him during his lifetime.
Process for Creating Strategy
We are highly aligned on the process for creating strategy, in which I focus on the logic of strategy choices, only analyze after establishing the logic, make sure multiple possibilities are considered in parallel, and try to make the final decision anticlimactic because participants have shaped the thinking process and the exploration.
Drucker is entirely consistent in MTRP:
“To get the facts first is impossible. There are no facts unless one has a criterion of relevance. Events by themselves are not facts.” “The only rigorous method, the only one that enables us to test an opinion against reality, is based on the clear recognition that opinions come first.” (471) That is why I hate SWOT and will only do analysis after the logic of a choice has been structured.
“A decision without an alternative is a desperate gambler’s throw, no matter how carefully thought through it might be.” (473)
“The specifications have been thought through, the alternatives explored, the risks and gains weighed. Who will have to do what is understood. At this point it is indeed reasonably clear what course of action should be taken. At this point the decision does indeed almost “make itself.” (479)
The Most Striking Thing About MTRP
I was stuck and deeply moved in my rereading of MTRP of just how worker-centric Drucker’s view of business is. He cares deeply about their lives and about making them productive. He even has a section on “pre-industrials” — workers that come to cities from pre-industrial economies (he cites (and remember this was 1973), Turks in German cities, rural Indians in Mexico City, Sicilians in Torino among others). They need special attention to become productive, effective workers.
He focuses on the central job of management as creating an environment and context that enables the worker to be effective. “The second task of management [of three] is to make work productive and the worker achieving.” (41) “Managing means making the strengths of people effective.” (307) “The purpose of an organization is to make the strengths of people productive and their weaknesses irrelevant.” (307)
The way to do that is not to control or intimidate the worker but rather enable the worker to demonstrate self-control. “The first thing to know is that controlling the work process means control of the work, and not control of the worker. Control is a tool of the worker and must never be his master.” (217–218) “In anything that has to do with knowledge, fear will produce only resistance.” (241) “But it also demands that measurement be used to make self-control possible rather than abused to control people from the outside and above — that is, to dominate them.” (407)
The ideas may seem radical or even scary, but the payoff is workers who problem-solve and produce of their own volition. “Particularly if feedback information is provided, the individual can normally work out his own optimal job design fairly fast and fairly effectively.” (273) “This means that no one can motivate him. He has to motivate himself. No one can direct him. He has to direct himself. Above all, no one can supervise him.” (279) “He acts not because somebody wants him to but because he himself decides that he has to — he acts, in other words, as a free man.” (442)
It is beautiful to read — I am glad Brendan directed me back to this gem of a book.
Practitioner Insights
My best advice on this front is to read MTRP if you haven’t already. It is, of course, not a strategy book and, with its 811 pages, covers a broader range of topics than Playing to Win. But it is as compatible with Playing to Win and the PTW/PI series as any book I have read.
Its core building block is the human being — whether in the form of a customer, a manual worker, a knowledge worker, a member of top management, or a pre-industrial worker. Everything builds logically from that foundational block — and in this way, its logic hangs together tightly. Too much of management theory ignores the human building block or uses caricatures of humans. Not Drucker. I often argue that we have to assume real people in anything we do — and this book reinforces that for me.
And wow was the man prescient politically: “The true class warfare is increasingly being fought between the hard hats — manual workers — and the liberals — employed, middle-class knowledge workers…The major political event for the remainder of this century may well be a growing split between these two groups.” (171) He was a bit off on the timing, but he perfectly predicted the US political realignment beginning with the 2016 Presidential election.
I will close out this piece with a few bon-bons from the great man, who was wonderfully pithy when he had a point to make:
- “Efficiency is concerned with doing things right. Effectiveness is doing the right things.” (45)
- “It is far more important to know the right thing to do than to know what to avoid doing. (51)
- “There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer. (61)
- “The first rule is that there are no irrational customers.” (83)
- “Men are very poor machine parts.” (226)
Thank you, Peter Drucker. May you rest for eternity in peace and tranquility.
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On another note, as I previewed a month ago, I am doing a PTW/PI podcast series with friend Tiffani Bova. The inaugeral show is on LinkedIn here on Wednesday, March 12th at 12 noon EST and 9am PST. Look forward to seeing you there!
