PPGA - Unisul [Blog do curso de mestrado em Administração]

“There are many books I could have written that are better than the ones I actually wrote. My best book would have been ‘Managing Ignorance’, and I’m very sorry I didn’t write it.”

The most enduring guru of them all, Peter Drucker (1909-2005) was the author of more than three dozen books, translated into almost as many languages. In 1997 McKinsey Quarterly said: “In the world of management gurus, there is no debate. Peter Drucker is the one guru to whom other gurus kowtow.” But unlike some of those that might have kowtowed to him, Drucker was a guru with charm who never set out to diminish others. Some commentators have remarked that although he was firmly embedded in the human-relations school of management—along with Douglas McGregor (see article) and Warren Bennis (see article), for example—the guru he himself most admired was Frederick Winslow Taylor, the father of “scientific” management.

Though born in Vienna, Drucker started his professional life in Frankfurt as a financial reporter, and he never lost his journalistic eye for a witty aphorism or a memorable metaphor. His writing is never dull, but nor is it superficial, in a field where both dullness and superficiality are common. He brought to it a Renaissance breadth of knowledge, and was as likely to refer to his beloved Jane Austen as to Taylor. Rosabeth Moss Kanter once wrote: “In the Drucker perspective … quality of life, technological progress and world peace are all the products of good management … at root, Drucker is a management Utopian, descended as much from Robert Owen as Max Weber.”

Drucker moved to England in the early 1930s and thence to America in 1937, where he stayed until his death 68 years later. He started in the United States as a correspondent for a number of British newspapers. From 1950 to 1972 he was professor of business at New York University Graduate School of Business. In 1971 he moved to California to help develop the country’s first executive MBA at Claremont Graduate University, and its business school is now named after him.

From his first management book, “The Concept of the Corporation”, published in 1946, to his last article, “What Makes an Effective Executive” (which won the prestigious McKinsey award for the best article to appear in Harvard Business Review in 2004), Drucker never failed to sympathise with the difficulties of managers and the demands of their task. In his 1954 book “The Practice of Management”, he argued that management was one of the major social innovations of the 20th century, primarily a human activity, not a mechanical or an economic one. He pioneered the idea of the corporation as a social institution.

In “The Concept of the Corporation”, Drucker argued strongly in favour of decentralised decision-making at a time when corporate role models such as General Motors were concentrating more and more power in their headquarters. He argued that the assembly line, so embedded at the heart of industrial efficiency, was in fact very inefficient because it only allowed things to be done in sequence. He also introduced the idea of management by objectives, aiming for long-term goals by setting a series of short-term ones. In 1969 he coined the phrase “knowledge worker”.

Drucker thought of himself as a loner, as someone well outside the mainstream of management education. “I have always been a loner,” he said once. “I work best outside. That’s where I’m most effective. I would be a very poor manager. Hopeless. And a company job would bore me to death. I enjoy being an outsider.”

Drucker was awarded the American Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2002.

Notable publications

“The End of Economic Man”, Heinemann, 1939

“The Concept of the Corporation”, John Day & Co, 1946

“The Practice of Management”, Harper, New York, 1954; Heinemann, London, 1955; revised edn, Butterworth-Heinemann, 2007

“The Age of Discontinuity”, Heinemann, 1967

Fonte: The Economist, 17 de outubro de 2008.

Veja Também:

• Série "Os pensadores em gestão mais influentes do mundo" em The Economist: Abraham Maslow
• Série "Os pensadores em gestão mais influentes do mundo" em The Economist: Gary Hamel
• Série "Os pensadores em gestão mais influentes do mundo" em The Economist: Douglas McGregor
• Série "Os pensadores em gestão mais influentes do mundo" em The Economist: C.K. Prahalad
• Série "Os pensadores em gestão mais influentes do mundo" em The Economist: Frank and Lillian Gilbreth
• Série "Os pensadores em gestão mais influentes do mundo" em The Economist: Michael Porter
• Série "Os pensadores em gestão mais influentes do mundo" em The Economist: Warren Bennis
• Série "Os pensadores em gestão mais influentes do mundo" em The Economist: Igor Ansoff

“What conditions of work, what kinds of work, what kinds of management, and what kinds of reward or pay will help human stature to grow healthy, to its fuller and fullest stature? Classic economic theory, based as it is on an inadequate theory of human motivation, could be revolutionised by accepting the results of higher human needs, including the impulse to self-actualisation and the love for the highest values.”

Abraham Maslow (1908-1970) was born in New York, the eldest of seven children of Russian immigrant parents. As a young man, he displeased them greatly by choosing to study psychology (at the University of Wisconsin) rather than law in New York, and by choosing to marry his cousin Bertha Goodman.

Maslow is undoubtedly the most influential anthropologist ever to have worked in industry. From his anthropological research among the Blackfoot Indians of Alberta, Canada, he claimed to have found “almost the same range of personalities as I find in our society”. He then worked in industry before becoming a professor of psychology at Brandeis University in Massachusetts. In the 1950s he became a leader of the humanistic school of psychology, a “third force” that he hoped would break through the divide between Freudian psychology and behaviourism. His thinking was original in that it was based on observations of normal behaviour, rather than on aberrations and mental sickness.

He is best known as the creator of the hierarchy of needs, a framework for thinking about human motivation (see article). His intention was not that this should be applied particularly to the workplace, but managers soon saw the relevance of Maslow’s framework to compensation packages.

Maslow was described by Peter Drucker as “the father of humanist psychology”. But Drucker took issue with Maslow’s hierarchy, complaining that he had not seen that “a want changes in the act of being satisfied”. Hence “as a want approaches satiety its capacity to reward, and with it its power as an incentive, diminishes fast”. And so (as we now know well) top executives can never be paid enough for them to be satisfied.

Maslow considered authoritarianism to be an aberration. The authoritarian characteristic, he said, “is the most important single disease afflicting man today—far more important than medical illnesses … the most widespread of all diseases … pandemic … even in the United States, even in this classroom”. People who achieve self-actualisation, he maintained, are democratic in outlook, not authoritarian.

Self-actualisation, at the top of his pyramid of needs, is the state that has most fascinated followers of Maslow. What is it? Who has achieved it? Maslow helped a bit by giving a list of people he felt had reached self-actualisation: Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Albert Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt, William James, Albert Schweitzer, Benedict Spinoza and Aldous Huxley, as well as 12 unnamed people alive at the time Maslow did his research.

He then helped further by describing what it was that motivated people at this level. These people, he claimed, sought after truth, rather than dishonesty; uniqueness, not bland uniformity; completion, rather than incompleteness; simplicity, not unnecessary complexity; playfulness, not grim, humourless, drudgery; and self-sufficiency, not dependency.

Maslow died in semi-retirement in California where he had moved because of ill-health.

Notable publications

“A Theory of Human Motivation”, Psychological Review, Vol. 50, 1943

“Motivation and Personality”, Harper New York 1954; 3rd edn revised Frager, R. et al., Harper & Row, 1987

Hoffman, E., “The Right to be Human: a Biography of Abraham Maslow”, McGraw-Hill, 1999

Kaplan, A. (ed.), “Maslow on Management”, John Wiley & Sons, 1998

Fonte: The Economist, 10 de outubro de 2008.

Veja também:

• Idéias – Hierarquia das necessidades humanas
• Série "Os pensadores em gestão mais influentes do mundo" em The Economist: Gary Hamel
• Série "Os pensadores em gestão mais influentes do mundo" em The Economist: Douglas McGregor
• Série "Os pensadores em gestão mais influentes do mundo" em The Economist: C.K. Prahalad
• Série "Os pensadores em gestão mais influentes do mundo" em The Economist: Frank and Lillian Gilbreth
• Série "Os pensadores em gestão mais influentes do mundo" em The Economist: Michael Porter
• Série "Os pensadores em gestão mais influentes do mundo" em The Economist: Warren Bennis
• Série "Os pensadores em gestão mais influentes do mundo" em The Economist: Igor Ansoff

The hierarchy of needs is an idea associated with one man, Abraham Maslow (see article), the most influential anthropologist ever to have worked in industry. It is a theory about the way in which people are motivated. First presented in a paper (“A Theory of Human Motivation”) published in the Psychological Review in 1943, it postulated that human needs fall into five different categories. Needs in the lower categories have to be satisfied before needs in the higher ones can act as motivators. Thus a violinist who is starving cannot be motivated to play Mozart, and a shop worker without a lunch break is less productive in the afternoon than one who has had a break.

The theory arose out of a sense that classic economics was not giving managers much help because it failed to take into account the complexity of human motivation. Maslow divided needs into five:

• Physiological needs: hunger, thirst, sex and sleep. Food and drinks manufacturers operate to satisfy needs in this area, as do prostitutes and tobacco growers.

• Safety needs: job security, protection from harm and the avoidance of risk. At this level an individual’s thoughts turn to insurance, burglar alarms and savings deposits.

• Social needs: the affection of family and friendship. These are satisfied by such things as weddings, sophisticated restaurants and telecommunications.

• Esteem needs (also called ego needs), divided into internal needs, such as self-respect and sense of achievement, and external needs, such as status and recognition. Industries focused on this level include the sports industry and activity holidays.

• Self-actualisation, famously described by Maslow: “A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately happy. What a man can be, he must be. This need we may call self-actualisation.” This involves doing things such as going to art galleries, climbing mountains and writing novels. The theatre, cinema and music industries are all focused on this level. Self-actualisation is different from the other levels of need in at least one important respect. It is never finished, never fully satisfied. It is, as Shakespeare put it, “as if increase of appetite grows by what it feeds on”.

An individual’s position in the hierarchy is constantly shifting and any single act may satisfy needs at different levels. Thus having a drink at a bar with a friend may be satisfying both a thirst and a need for friendship (levels one and three). Single industries can be aimed at satisfying needs at different levels. For example, a hotel may provide food to satisfy level one, a nearby restaurant to satisfy level three, and special weekend tours of interesting sites to satisfy level five.

The hierarchy is not absolute. It is affected by the general environment in which the individual lives. The extent to which social needs are met in the workplace, for instance, varies according to culture. In Japan the corporate organisation is an important source of a man’s sense of belonging (although not of a woman’s); in the West it is much less so.

Peter Drucker took issue with the hierarchy of needs. He wrote:

What Maslow did not see is that a want changes in the act of being satisfied … as a want approaches satiety, its capacity to reward, and with it its power as an incentive, diminishes fast. But its capacity to deter, to create dissatisfaction, to act as a disincentive, rapidly increases.

One of Maslow’s early disciples was a Californian company called NLS (Non-Linear Systems). In the early 1960s it dismantled its assembly line and replaced it with production teams of six or seven workers in order to increase their motivation. Each team was responsible for the entire production process, and they worked in areas that they decorated according to their own taste. A host of other innovations (such as dispensing with time cards) revolutionised the company. Profits and productivity soared, but Maslow remained sceptical. He worried that his ideas were being too easily “taken as gospel truth, without any real examination of their reliability”.

Further reading

Maslow, A., “A Theory of Human Motivation”, Psychological Review, Vol. 50, 1943

Maslow, A., “Motivation and Personality”, Harper New York 1954; 3rd edn revised Frager, R. et al., Harper & Row, 1987

Hoffman, E., “The Right to be Human: a Biography of Abraham Maslow”, McGraw-Hill, 1999

Kaplan, A. (ed.), “Maslow on Management”, John Wiley & Sons, 1998

Fonte: The Economist, 13 de outubro de 2008.

Veja também:

• Teorias X e Y

“Behind every managerial decision or action are assumptions about human nature and human behaviour.”

Douglas McGregor (born 1906) died at the comparatively young age of 58 in 1964. He had a fairly straightforward academic career, lecturing at Harvard University and MIT, where he set up its industrial relations department and became one of its first Sloan professors. He became president of Antioch College in 1948 but returned to MIT after six years and remained there until his death.

He had an informal teaching style, which many of his students remembered with affection, often sitting with his feet up on the lecture desk. When not sitting, he was invariably jangling keys and coins in his pockets.

McGregor did not publish much; but what he did publish had a great impact. In 1993 he was listed as the most popular management writer of all time, alongside Henri Fayol. Like many of the gurus we have written about, he was not necessarily the first to come across the idea associated with him. But he was the first to “name” it. Because of his facility with metaphor and his easy writing style, the idea subsequently became his.

A social psychologist by training, McGregor was strongly affected by work he did as a young man at his grandfather’s institute for transient labourers in Detroit. Close to Abraham Maslow, and greatly influenced by him, McGregor became a significant counter to the thinking and influence of scientific management. His central idea is that there are two fundamentally different styles of management. One of them he called Theory X and the other Theory Y (see article). Theory X is authoritarian, assuming that individuals only ever work reluctantly. Theory Y is liberating and assumes that people will do almost anything if they are committed to the overall goals of their organisation.

Although McGregor’s book on the theory was not published until 1960, he first outlined it in a speech at MIT’s Sloan School of Management in April 1957. In “Frontiers of Excellence” (Nicholas Brealey, 1994) Robert Waterman revealed that Theory Y had been a secret weapon in Procter & Gamble’s competitive armoury for many years. A senior P&G executive had invited McGregor in the mid-1950s to set up a detergent plant in Augusta, Georgia, along the lines of Theory Y. The executive, back from the Korean war, was convinced that military-style command-and-control management did not work in corporate life.

The Augusta plant was run in a non-hierarchical way with self-motivating teams along the lines of Theory Y, and by the mid-1960s it was 30% more productive than any other P&G plant. The principle was subsequently applied to other P&G plants, but the company kept the story secret for almost 40 years, regarding it as a competitive advantage.

Many leading management figures of recent years, including Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Warren Bennis (see article—who was a student of McGregor’s at MIT) and Tom Peters, have acknowledged that much of modern management thinking goes back to McGregor. Bennis says, “Just as every economist, knowingly or not, pays his dues to Keynes, we are all, one way or another, disciples of McGregor.”

Some, however, have criticised his ideas as being tough on the weaker members of society, those who need guidance and who are not necessarily self-starters. There are, moreover, conspicuous examples of companies that have followed Theory Y precepts and yet foundered: DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation), steered by its charismatic founder, Ken Olsen, for one.

Shortly before he died, McGregor was developing an outline for something he called Theory Z, an answer to many of the criticisms of Theories X and Y. But his thoughts were never widely published.

Notable publications

“The Human Side of Enterprise”, McGraw-Hill, 1960; annotated edn, McGraw-Hill, 2006

Fonte: The Economist, 3 de outubro de 2008.

Veja também:

• Teorias X e Y

• Série "Os pensadores em gestão mais influentes do mundo" em The Economist: C.K. Prahalad

• Série "Os pensadores em gestão mais influentes do mundo" em The Economist: Frank and Lillian Gilbreth

• Série "Os pensadores em gestão mais influentes do mundo" em The Economist: Michael Porter

• Série "Os pensadores em gestão mais influentes do mundo" em The Economist: Warren Bennis

• Série "Os pensadores em gestão mais influentes do mundo" em The Economist: Igor Ansoff