Peter Drucker: 1909–2005

ГОСУДАРСТВЕННЫЙ УНИВЕРСИТЕТ

Высшая Школа Экономики

Нижегородский филиал

Кафедра иностранных языков

Н.А. Емельянова

Managing people

Учебно - методическое пособие

Г. Нижний Новгород

Г.

ББК 81.2 Англ.

Е-60

Работа обсуждена и одобрена на заседании кафедры иностранных языков 2008г.

Рецензент: Смирнова Н.И.., канд. филол. наук, доцент, зав. кафедрой иностранных языков Нижегородского филиала ГУ – ВШЭ.

Предлагаемые учебно-методические материалы представляют собой ридер для студентов II года обучения факультета менеджмента и имеют целью развитие навыков чтения оригинальных текстов по специальности. Тексты взяты из оригинальных источников (журналов The economist, Fortune), снабжены заданиями для проверки понимания почитанного, а также для развития и совершенствования коммуникативных навыков.

ББК 82.2 Англ.

© Нижегородский филиал Государственого университета – Высшей школы экономики, - г. Н. Новгород, ул. Б. Печерская, 25.

Text 1

Peter Drucker: 1909–2005

An Appreciation by Geoffrey Colvin

"WE ARE PETER AND GEOFF," SAID PETER DRUCKER, AND he wasn't asking me, he was telling me. I was about to introduce him at a management conference. He had been through it all countless times before and understood that I would never pre­sume to call a 91-year-old man by his first name, especially not a great man whom I revered. But in conversation we would be on a first-name basis, he insisted. I'm not sure I ever did bring myself to call him Petcr. I think 1 just avoided calling him anything.

When it came to Drucker, who died Nov. 11 at the age of 95, the world suffered from Great Man syndrome, but he did not. He was justly lauded and adored as the greatest management thinker and writer of all time, but he wasn't interested in any of that. Whenever I encountered him, as I did into his 90s, I found a man who was smiling, cheerful, and funny. His hearing and sight were going fast, yet he wasn't old. I don't know how you get to be ninety-something without grow­ing world-weary, but he did it.

That means he was guaranteed fun to talk to on any subject. As it happened, we had something in common, since Drucker had been a journalist as a young man in Germany. He thus had license to be scathing on the topic, as he was also when it came to management consultants who are low on sub­stance but high on marketing piz­zazz, of which there are always a few. He had a brilliant line that skewered both groups: "The rea­son reporters call these people guru, is that they're not sure how to spell 'charlatan.'''

Drucker simply didn't care about the conventional view on any management topic, since he had thought them all through and knew where he stood. Yet I was still surprised by the vehemence with which he disdained the mod­ern vogue for exalting leadership, as distinct from paltry old man­agement. It infuriated him, though he was too polite to say so un­less you asked him about, which I did. His reasoning was extremely simple: "The three greatest leaders of the 20th century were Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. If that's leadership, I want no part of it."

There were many things Drucker wanted no part of. Big uni­versities, for instance. He scorned them all to remain at tiny Claremumt College - payback, perhaps, for the scorn they'd heaped on him early in his carer. Economists dismissed his work as cheap sociology. Sociologists had no use for business. And Drucker was dismissive of them all. "No economists were inter­ested in organizations," he explained in a 2001 interview with my colleague Jerry Useem. The field "was based on the asinine as­sumption that organizations act like individuals. They don't." Here, Drucker had sensed a huge opportunity. Like any great en­trepreneur - "somebody who creates something new," as he once defined the term - he was raiding these older disciplines to cre­ate one that didn't yet exist. Physics sprang from Newton, eco­nomics from Adam Smith. And Peter Drucker became the undis­puted father of management - the discipline devoted to the study of organizations

Drucker's career was so productive for so long - his first U.S. book was in 1939, his last Harvard Business Review article in 2004 - that he pretty well ran the table on management topics. James Thurber once told how disconcerting it was for him as a hu­morist to light on an excellent subject, only to find, as he often did, that Robert Benchley had written a shorter and funnier piece about it 20 years before. The situation for us management writers is far worse. Think of vir­tually any hot topic in business to­day other than the Internet­ - global competition, executive pay, the rise of information and sеr­vices - and odds are that Drucker wrote about it with extraordinary perception, probably before 1970. It's one thing to talk about the rise of the "knowledge worker." It's another thing to predict it in 1959.

I once mentioned а particular debt to him, noting that in writing a piece for PORTUNE's 70th-an­niversary issue I had relied on his work about the evolution of man­agement. He reminded me that he had been the editor of FORT'UNE's tenth-anniversary issue. Henry Luce had spotted him - Drucker was just 30-and asked him to oversee the issue on short notice. It was apparently a rude shock. "We had two months to go," Drucker recalled. "Absolutely nothing had been done." No wonder he liked to make fun of journalists.

When Drucker and I - excuse me, Peter and I - were done chat­ting on that stage, I stepped forward to introduce him. He was to my left, seated, since he couldn't stand up for the hour his talk would last. Nor was his hearing good enough to understand any­thing I was saying at the podium. He would begin speaking when he saw me leave the stage and heard the applause for him.

I reminded the audience that on each of the two previous morn­ings I had introduced a Nobel Prize winner in economics. Now it was time for Drucker. Of course there isn't any Nobel Prize in management thinking and writing. But as I explained on that morning, it's probably just as well - because if there were, it would have been won every year by the same man.

Fortune

I. Find in the text:

допускать, осмеливаться; почитать кого-либо; заставить себя сделать что-либо; страдать; обожать; слух зрение, иметь что-то общее с кем-либо, приводить в негодование, обоснование, презирать кого-либо (что-либо), жизнерадостный, традиционный взгляд на что-либо; предположение; посвятить кому-либо (чему-либо); актуальная тема..

II. Explain the following:

His hearing and sight were going fast, he was ninetysomething, to grow world-weary, to have license to be scathing on the topic, to be low on substance, to be high on marketing pizzazz, to be on a first-name basis.

III. Answer the questions:

1. Why did Peter Drucker want to be called by his first name?

2. Was it easy for the author to be on a first-name basis with Peter Drucker? Why?

3. How is Peter Drucker characterized by the author?

4. What was Peter Drucker’s attitude to conventional view on management topics?

5. Why did he scorn big universities?

6. Can we call him an entrepreneur? Why?

7. Why is Peter Drucker considered to be the greatest management thinker of all time?

IV. Comment on the statements:

1. I avoided calling him anything.

2. The world suffered from Great Man syndrome, but he did not.

3. I don't know how you get to be ninetysomething without grow­ing world-weary, but he did it.

4. He was guaranteed fun to talk to on any subject.

5. Some management consultants are low on sub­stance but high on marketing piz­zazz.

6. "The three greatest leaders of the 20th century were Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. If that's leadership, I want no part of it."

7. Think of vir­tually any hot topic in business to­day other than the Internet­ - and odds are that Drucker wrote about it with extraordinary perception, probably before 1970.

8. It's one thing to talk about the rise of the "knowledge worker." It's another thing to predict it in 1959.

9. It is probably just that there isn’t any Nobel Prize winner in management thinking and writing.

V. Speak on the points:

1. Peter Drucker’s personality.

2. Peter Drucker – the greatest management thinker of all time.

3. Peter Drucker’s career.

Text 2