The Practice of Management

"Well, my interest was first stimulated by my elder brother and co-author Ken. As an engineer, he had worked for many different companies in Britain and the US and been struck by the enormous differences which existed in managerial styles between these two countries. Although each enjoyed strengths and weaknesses, the American version was, in his opinion, much superior. This started him off on a lifelong study of what you might call ‘comparative national managerial cultures’. He began to write a book about it way back in the 1970s, but regrettably took ill and became a chronic invalid soon after. As a result, his book would be put on hold for many years. About seven years ago, I said to him that it was a very important book and persuaded him that we should try to produce it together and so we co-wrote our book, The Puritan Gift. The Puritan migrants, who went from England to America in the 1630s, brought with them an enormously successful managerial culture which we refer to as the ‘gift’ in our book. In the next three centuries, this gift provided the driving force behind the transformation of 13 tiny colonies into the most powerful nation in the world. Under the US occupation of Japan from 1945 to 1952, America would implant this same culture, metaphorically, in the soil of its defeated enemy, an event which led to the Japanese economic miracle. The story doesn’t end there; the Japanese would teach this same culture to the future ‘Asian Tigers’, including Taiwan, Singapore and South Korea in the 1970s and 1980s. The Taiwanese then passed it to mainland China in the 1990s and to Vietnam in the decade just past. A managerial culture that had its origins in East Anglia before 1600 would conquer a large part of the globe. The Puritans’ gift to America became Japan’s gift to the world. Where will it go from here? Let us hope it reaches large parts of Africa, where it is badly needed to raise the general standard of living. The author Peter Drucker was by any standard a remarkable man. He was an Austrian Jew who emigrated to the US in 1933. I got to know him in the 1950s when he was an adviser to the shipping company W R Grace in New York, where I worked as a financial analyst. The Practice of Management describes American managerial culture as it was at the mid-20th century and is a treasure trove of information about the period. Drucker’s choice of title is significant. He saw management neither as an art nor as a science, but as something one did in practice. In our book, my brother and I use a different term, ‘craft’, which we believe to be more precise than ‘practice’, but all of us are getting at the same thing. A craft is something that is learned in practice under the direction of a master. This is precisely how good management was taught and learned in American companies of that period; it was not something that you learned in a class at college."