I’ve been on a bit of a reading binge lately.
What I have been reading is a lot of the classic business texts that laid the foundation for much of what we consider best practices now.
One of my favorites is Managing For Results by Peter Drucker because it is the first book on business strategy.
Reading this classic got me to thinking about how it could be updated for modern times.
There are 3 big sections of the book:
I. Understanding the business
II. Focusing on opportunities
III. A program for performance
These sections would break down exactly the same today.
The real challenge would be how to fill in the blanks on each section.
Modern business would require a comprehensive review of the emerging and new use of old business models for new industries like subscriptions being used almost everywhere.
We’d also need a significant investment in understanding the role of modern marketing because of the amount of noise that exists in our current advertising and marketing environment.
What would hold consistent in any study would be a focus on opportunities which when you look at a lot of the ideas coming out of Silicon Valley is desperately needed.
And, a program for performance would probably build off of Drucker’s work on managing by objectives.
I think the overarching theme would be one of change but continuity as well. Because one thing I have learned from revisiting Drucker is that many of the basics he discovered and wrote about have held up extremely well. Ma