Jason Fried via Fast Company on what matters:
- Are you profitable?
- Are you building something great?
- Are you taking care of your people?
- Are you treating your customers well?
Turning in a profit while building something great in the service of your customers and your people. That’s as complete a précis as they come. Much along the lines of Peter Drucker’s 5 questions.
One of football/soccer’s renowned strategist kept detailed accounts of his opponents’ strengths and weaknesses, but he also kept his eyes on the game’s essentials: “The ball is round” and “The game lasts 90 minutes”.
Not unlike “What is our business?” and “Who is our customer?” that are part of Drucker’s essential five questions you must ask about your oganization..
our three greatest living academic organizational theorists are, in my opinion, The University of Michigan’s Karl Weick, Stanford’s (now retired) James March, and Jeff Pfeffer. When I say “academic,” I mean scholars who have contributed important theories and published extensively in peer reviewed academic journals. If you look at the work of any organizational theorist who has ever lived, no one except for perhaps Nobel Prize Winner Herbert Simon exceeds the breadth and depth of Jeff’s contributions. (…)
What distinguishes Jeff from other star academic organizational theorists, however, is that he uses so much of this academic knowledge to influence what organizations and their managers actually do. Jeff isn’t as well known in managerial circles as Peter Drucker or Jim Collins. But I believe that his work should be as well-known because his ideas are so research-based and so practical. And unlike most star academics in his field, Jeff is deeply immersed in the stuff of organizational life. (source)
My friends at Hermann International are announcing the launch of their new website. I took the Certification training with Ann Hermann a few years ago and it helped me bring down to earth a lot of the literature on learning preferences and brain dominance.
Peter Drucker is the author that best (and first) articulated management from a whole-brain perspective (“Management as a liberal art”). Here are a few words from a faculty member at the business school that bears his name:
A central strength of Peter’s work is that his agile mind and depth of knowledge enabled him to examine management through insights gleaned from many of humankind’s most important fields of thought. He wove ideas from economics, political theory, history, psychology, philosophy and sociology to create a holistic tapestry of management and society. This enables him to see what others fail to see. Also, precisely because his insights were grounded in the fundamentals of the human condition, they have an enduring quality. Link
