- Doris Drucker
- “Peter taught management not as an end in iteself but as a means to create organizations for building and supporting a civil society.” Doris Drucker October 27, 2006
- Peter Drucker
- “The organizations of the society of organizations are special-purpose organs. Each is good at only one task; and this specialization alone gives them their capacity to perform.”
- “Organizations can only do damage to themselves and to society if they tackle tasks that are beyond their specialized competence, their specialized values, their specialized functions. The American hospital did a good deal of harm to itself and little good to the community when it attempted to take on the inner city’s social ills by founding “inner-city clinics.” The American school has failed miserably to produce racial integration. In both cases, the causes are undoubtedly good; they cry out for action. But the action needed ⎯ or at least the action chosen by these various organizations ⎯ was beyond such organizations’ focus and function, and totally beyond their competence.”
- And yet who else is there to take care of society, its problems and its ills? These organizations collectively are society…Power must always be balanced by responsibility; otherwise it becomes tyranny. And organizations do have power.”
Source: Peter F. Drucker,Post Capitalist Society (New York, NY: HarperCollins books,1993), p 101 - “Leaders in every single institution and in every single sector … have two responsibilities. They are responsible and accountable for the performance of their institutions, and that requires them and their institutions to be concentrated, focused, limited. They are responsible also, however, for the community as a whole.”
Source: Leader to Leader
Relevance: The community is the responsibility of every institutional leader. How that translates into actions and decisions is what social responsibility is all about. - “Kierkegaard’s question, how is human existence possible?, has a simple answer: human existence is possible only in tension between man’s simultaneous life as an individual in the spirit and as a citizen in society.”
Source: Peter F. Drucker, Men, ideas and politics. New York; Harper & Row, 1971.,
Relevance: Much of social responsibility is recognizing and managing with this tension. - “Primum non nocere – first, do no harm – is the first responsibility of a professional, as spelled out in the Hippocratic oath. “As the physicians found out long ago, this apparently modest requirement is far from easy. It requires a far-reaching understanding of the impact of our actions on another person or on a society, and a willingness to think through our effect on others.”
Source: Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, New York, Harper & Row, 1974 - “The first responsibility of business is to make enough profit to cover the costs for the future. If this social responsibility is not met, no other social responsibility can be met.”
Peter F. Drucker, The Practice of Management - “In most discussions of the social responsibility of business it is assumed that making a profit is fundamentally incompatible with social responsibility or is at least irrelevant to it.”
- “Only if business learns how to convert the major social challenges facing developed societies today into novel and profitable business opportunities can we hope to surmount these challenges in the future.”
- “The propoer social responsibility of business is to tame the dragon–that is, to turn a social problem into economic opportunity and economic benefit, into productive capacity, into human competence, into ell-paid jobs, and into wealth.”
Source: Peter F. Drucker, Frontiers of Management. New York; Truman Talley Books, 1968., p 323
- It is the increasingly important responsibility (of management) to create the capital that alone can finance tomorrow’s jobs. In a modern economy the main source of capital formation is business profits.
Source: Peter F. Drucker, Frontiers of Management. New York; Truman Talley Books, 1968.,
- “Social responsibility objectives need to be built into the strategy of a business, rather than merely be statements of good intentions.”
Source: Peter F. Drucker, Frontiers of Management. New York; Truman Talley Books, 1968.,
|
