Peter Drucker: Top-management

More from Peter Drucker's Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices follows.

Top-management is not a single task; it is multidimensional. The following is only a sketch; he says lots more about each one. It is also a partial list.

1. The task of thinking through the mission of the business.

2. Setting standards.

3. Building and maintaining the organization, its structure and design.

4. The major relations which only the people at the top can establish and maintain. They may be relations with customers or major suppliers. They may be relations with the industry, bankers, the financial community, government, or other outside institutions.

5. There are countless “ceremonial” functions.

6. There is a need for a “stand-by” organ for major crises. (MTRP 611-12).

“[A] peculiar characteristic of top-management tasks is that they require a diversity of capabilities, and, above all, of temperaments. They require the capacity to analyze, to think, to weigh alternatives, and to harmonize dissent. But they also require the capacity for quick and decisive action, for boldness, and for intuitive courage. They require being at home with abstract ideas, concepts, calculations, and figures. They also require perception of people, a human awareness, and empathy and altogether a lively interest in people and respect for them. Some tasks demand that a man work by himself, and alone. Others are tasks of representation and ceremonial, outside tasks, that require the politician’s enjoyment of crowds and protocol; the ability to represent and to make a good impression by saying nothing.

“The top-management tasks require at least four different kinds of human being: the “thought man,” the “people man,” the “action man,” and the “front man.” Yet these four temperaments are almost never found in one person” (MTRP 616).