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Wednesday, September 08, 2010
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Preface:

The Alternative to Tyranny

It is fashionable today to talk of a revolt against authority and to proclaim that everybody should "do his own thing." This, then, I have to admit, is a most unfashionable book. It does not talk about rights. It stresses responsibility. Its focus is not on doing one’s own thing but on performance.

Our society has become, within an incredibly short fifty years, a society of institutions. It has become a pluralist society in which every major social task has been entrusted to large organizations—from producing economic goods and services to health care, from social security and welfare to education, from the search for new knowledge to the protection of the natural environment.

 

 

 

It is understandable that the sudden realization of this change in the crystal structure of society has evoked an angry response, "Down with organization!" But it is the wrong response. The alternative to autonomous institutions that function and perform is not freedom. It is totalitarian tyranny.

Our society is neither willing nor able to do without the services that only the institutions can provide. And the most vocal among our modern Luddites, the would-be institution wreckers, the highly educated young people, are even less able to do without the large organizations than the rest of us. For it is only in the large organizations that there exist plentiful opportunities to make a living through knowledge, to make a contribution through knowledge, and to achieve through knowledge.

If the institutions of our pluralist society of institutions do not perform in responsible autonomy, we will not have individualism and a society in which there is a chance for people to fulfill themselves. We will instead impose on ourselves complete regimentation in which no one will be al lowed autonomy. We will have Stalinism rather than participatory democracy, let alone the joyful spontaneity of doing one’s own thing. Tyranny is the only alternative to strong, performing autonomous institutions Tyranny substitutes one absolute boss for the pluralism of competing institutions. It substitutes terror for responsibility. It does indeed do away with the institutions, but only by submerging all of them in the one all-embracing bureaucracy of the apparat. It does produce goods and services, though only fitfully, wastefully, at a low level, and at an enormous cost in suffering, humiliation, and frustration. To make our institutions perform responsibly, autonomously, and on a high level of achievement is thus the only safeguard of freedom and dignity in the pluralist society of institutions.

But it is managers and management that make institutions perform. Performing, responsible management is the alternative to tyranny and our only protection against it.

Management is work, and as such it has its own skills, its own tools, its own techniques. A good many skills, tools, and techniques are discussed in this book, a few in some detail. But the stress is not on skills, tools, and techniques. It is not even on the work of management. It is on the tasks.

For management is the organ, the life-giving, acting, dynamic organ of the institution it manages. Without the institution, e.g., the business enterprise, there would be no management. But without management there would also be only a mob rather than an institution. The institution, in turn, is itself an organ of society and exists only to contribute a needed result to society, the economy, and the individual. Organs, however, are never defined by what they do, let alone by how they do it. They are defined by their contribution.

Most books on management are books on the work of management. They look at management from the inside. This book starts with the tasks. It looks at management first from the outside and studies the dimensions of the tasks and the requirements in respect to each of them (Part One). Only then (in Part Two) does it turn to the work of the organization and the skills of management, and (in Part Three) to top management, its tasks, its structures, and its strategies.

I myself have for many years been deeply interested in the management sciences, that is, in the manager’s logical and analytical tools. But there are no equations in this book, no graphs, no mathematical formulas, not even a table. The stress throughout the book is not on how to do, let alone on how to make the tools to do it. Even when discussing skills, even when discussing the management sciences themselves, the stress is on accomplishments and results. This book is task-focused throughout.

This book is also manager-focused. The starting point was the question, What does the manager have to know, or at least to understand, to be equal to his task?