Awhile ago, I asked some questions about management in general and told you I would get back to you in a couple of weeks. Here we are more than a month later, and I'm finally getting back to you. After reading almost the entirety of The Essential Drucker, I've found a few answers.
I think Drucker views management as a set of tasks. He specifically calls out three fundamental purposes of management: setting the vision of the organization, increasing efficiency and effectiveness of capital (both human and physical), and dealing with "social impacts and social responsibilities" (page 14). Drucker routinely calls management a "liberal art" because managers must draw on a lot of different knowledge and apply it different ways(pages 12-13). In short, I think management is about directing resources and being accountable for those resources.
On the whole, there were two themes of the book I really liked. First, value is created outside of the firm. He even goes so far at one point to say that there is no such thing as profit centers, but only "effort centers" (page 199). I think this fits Hayek's idea of the structure of production, where value is created when the customer uses the product. Second, Drucker seems to draw a distinction between the manager, the executive and the leader. For all three, it's not about one's position in the organization, but about the behavior of the person. If management is about making decisions about resources, then even individual contributors who don't have direct reports may have to be managers.
To tie this back to MBM a bit, I think Drucker's definition of management points out why MBM is a useful framework for everyone in an organization, even if one isn't a "manager" of direct reports. Unless someone is micro-managed every moment of the day, he or she will have to make decisions about the resources needed to get the job done.
Don't feel like reading a big fat book by Drucker? There's a cool set of videos on youtube from TheDruckerSchool. Here's one of them:
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