Peter Drucker and the perils of fact-based management

The problem with “fact-based decision-making”, so popular these days among leaders and business schools, is that it’s bound by its nature to restrict the possibilities for future action.

If what you have is a bagful of incremental innovations in your pipeline, chances are that fact-based may serve you well.

But if you are looking to have some breakthroughs in there, it’s very unlikely that the deepest, widest crunching of the data will be of any real help. Indeed a fact-based approach may well be the most efficient way to kill them off at birth.

Ideas-based management? So much more likely to grow your business.

As the great management guru Peter Drucker put it: “The understanding that underlies the right decision grows out of the clash and conflict of divergent opinions and out of serious consideration of competing alternatives. To get the facts first is impossible.”

KPIs OK?

I wonder whether the whole theory and practice of Management By Objectives has had the overall effect of improving performance or containing it? Or even, perish the thought, reducing it?

MBO was popularised by Peter Drucker in his The Practice of Management of 1954. Since that time, it has become ubiquitous, all employees having to have Key Performance Indicators by which they are assessed.

I’m sure that it appeals strongly to leaders who want to have CONTROL. The mantra “What gets measured gets done” is one of those articles of faith that is parroted to generation after generation of managers.

It seems to me that if people are engaged in, even inspired by, their work, then KPIs are often in reality a rather dreary invitation to deliver below their potential.