In more than 30 essays for Harvard Business Review, Peter Drucker (1909-2005) urged readers to take on the hard work of thinking--always combined, he insisted, with decisive action. He closely analyzed the phenomenon of knowledge work--the growing call for employees who use their minds rather than their hands--and explained how it challenged the conventional wisdom about the way organizations should be run. He was intrigued by employees who knew more about certain subjects than their bosses or colleagues but who still had to cooperate with others in a large organization. As the business world matured in the second half of the 20th century, executives came to think that they knew how to run companies--and Drucker took it upon himself to poke holes in their assumptions, lest organizations become stale. But he did so sympathetically, operating from the premise that his readers were intelligent, hardworking people of goodwill. Well suited to HBR's format of practical, idea-based essays for executives, his clear-eyed, humanistic writing enriched the magazine time and again. This article is a compilation of the savviest management advice Drucker offered HBR readers over the years--in short, his greatest hits. It revisits the following insightful, influential contributions: "The Theory of the Business" (September-October 1994); "Managing for Business Effectiveness" (May-June 1963); "What Business Can Learn from Nonprofits" (July-August 1989); "The New Society of Organizations" (September-October 1992); "The Information Executives Truly Need" (January-February 1995); "Managing Oneself" (March-April 1999, republished January 2005); "They're Not Employees, They're People" (February 2002); and "What Makes an Effective Executive" (June 2004).

Throughout history, people had little need to manage their careers-they were born into their stations in life or, in the recent past, they relied on their companies to chart their career paths. But times have drastically changed. Today we must all learn to manage ourselves. What does that mean? As Peter Drucker tells us in this seminal article first published in 1999, it means we have to learn to develop ourselves. We have to place ourselves where we can make the greatest contribution to our organizations and communities. And we have to stay mentally alert and engaged during a 50-year working life, which means knowing how and when to change the work we do. It may seem obvious that people achieve results by doing what they are good at and by working in ways that fit their abilities. But, Drucker says, very few people actually know-let alone take advantage of-their fundamental strengths. He challenges each of us to ask ourselves: What are my strengths? How do I perform? What are my values? Where do I belong? What should my contribution be? Don't try to change yourself, Drucker cautions. Instead, concentrate on improving the skills you have and accepting assignments that are tailored to your individual way of working. If you do that, you can transform yourself from an ordinary worker into an outstanding performer. Today's successful careers are not planned out in advance. They develop when people are prepared for opportunities because they have asked themselves those questions and have rigorously assessed their unique characteristics. This article challenges readers to take responsibility for managing their futures, both in and out of the office.

An effective executive does not need to be a leader in the typical sense of the word. Peter Drucker, the author of more than two dozen HBR articles, says some of the best business and nonprofit CEOs he has worked with over his 65-year consulting career were not stereotypical leaders. They ranged from extroverted to nearly reclusive, from easygoing to controlling, from generous to parsimonious. What made them all effective is that they followed the same eight practices: They asked, "What needs to be done?" and "What is right for the enterprise?" They developed action plans. They took responsibility for decisions and for communicating. They were focused on opportunities rather than problems. They ran productive meetings. And they thought and said "we" rather than "I." The first two practices provided them with the knowledge they needed. The next four helped them convert this knowledge into effective action, for knowledge is useless to executives until it has been translated into deeds. The last two ensured that the whole organization felt responsible and accountable. Effective executives know that they have authority only because they have the trust of the organization. This means they must think of the needs and opportunities of the organization before they think of their own. The author also suggests a ninth practice that's so important, he elevates it to the level of a rule: Listen first, speak last. Effectiveness is a discipline. And, like every discipline, it can be learned and must be earned.

How much of innovation is inspiration, and how much is hard work? The answer lies somewhere in the middle, says management thinker Peter Drucker. In this HBR classic from 1985, he argues that innovation is real work that can and should be managed like any other corporate function. Success is more likely to result from the systematic pursuit of opportunities than from a flash of genius. Indeed, most innovative business ideas arise through the methodical analysis of seven areas of opportunity. Within a company or industry, opportunities can be found in unexpected occurrences, incongruities of various kinds, process needs, or changes in an industry or market. Outside a company, opportunities arise from demographic changes, changes in perception, or new knowledge. There is some overlap among the sources, and the potential for innovation may well lie in more than one area at a time. Innovations based on new knowledge tend to have the greatest effect on the marketplace, but it often takes decades before the ideas are translated into actual products, processes, or services. The other sources of innovation are easier and simpler to handle, yet they still require managers to look beyond established practices, Drucker explains. The author emphasizes that innovators need to look for simple, focused solutions to real problems.

In this essay, business thinker Peter Drucker examines the changing dynamics of the workforce--in particular, the need for organizations to take just as much care and responsibility when managing temporary and contract workers as they do with their traditional employees. Two fast-growing trends are demanding that business leaders pay more attention to employee relations, Drucker says. First is the rise of the temporary, or contract, worker; 8 million to 10 million temp workers are placed each day worldwide. And they're not just filling in at reception desks. Today, there are temp suppliers for every kind of job, all the way up to CEO. Second, a growing number of businesses are outsourcing their employee relations to professional employee organizations (PEOs)--third-party groups that handle the ever-mounting administrative tasks associated with managing a company's employees. Temps and PEOs free up leaders to focus on the business rather than on HR files and paperwork. But if organizations outsource those functions, they need to be careful not to damage relationships with their people in the process, Drucker concludes.

The most important contribution of management in the 20th century was to increase manual-worker productivity fifty-fold. The most important contribution of management in the 21st century will be to increase knowledge-worker productivity--hopefully by the same percentage. So far it is abysmally low and in many areas (hospital nurses, for instance, or design engineers in the automobile industry) actually lower than it was 70 years ago. So far, almost no one has addressed it. Yet we know how to increase--and rapidly--the productivity of knowledge workers. The methods, however, are totally different from those that increased the productivity of manual workers.

On its 75th anniversary, HBR asked five of the business world's most insightful thinkers to comment on the challenges taking shape for executives as they move into the next century. 1) In "The Future That Has Already Happened," Peter Drucker examines the effects of the increasing underpopulation of the world's developed countries. 2) Esther Dyson's article "Mirror, Mirror on the Wall" reveals the mind shift executives will need to make in a networked world, where companies will be known for what they do rather than for what they say. 3) The old language of property and ownership no longer serves executives, writes Charles Handy in "The Citizen Corporation." 4) Technology has given executives more information than today's machines can help them understand, explains Paul Saffo in "Are You Machine Wise?" 5) Peter Senge's article "Communities of Leaders and Learners" urges executives to reject the myth of leaders as isolated heroes and instead to build a community of leaders.

The ability to gather, arrange, and manipulate information with computers has given business people new tools for managing. But data processing tools have done more than simply enable executives to do the same tasks better. They have changed the very concepts of what a business is and what managing means. To manage in the future, executives will need an information system integrated with strategy, rather than individual tools that so far have been used largely to record the past. The executive's tool kit has four kinds of diagnostic information: foundation information, productivity information, competence information, and resource-allocation information. The sources of the information are so diverse, and sifting through and interpreting it for a specific business are so difficult, that even small companies will need help from data specialists.

In his thirty-first article for HBR, Peter F. Drucker argues that what underlies the current malaise of so many large and successful organizations worldwide is that their theory of the business no longer works. The story is a familiar one: a company that was a superstar only yesterday finds itself stagnating and frustrated, in trouble and, often, in a seemingly unmanageable crisis. The root cause of nearly every one of these crises is not that things are being done poorly. It is not even that the wrong things are being done. Indeed, in most cases, the right things are being done--but fruitlessly. What accounts for this apparent paradox? The assumptions on which the organization has been built and is being run no longer fit reality. These are the assumptions that shape any organization's behavior, dictate its decisions about what to do and what not to do, and define what an organization considers meaningful results. These assumptions are what Drucker calls a company's theory of the business.

Drucker argues that in the post-capitalist society, managers must learn to negotiate a new environment with a different set of work rules and career expectations. Companies currently face downsizing and turmoil with increasing regularity. In addition, businesses in the post-capitalist society grow through many and varied complicated alliances, often baffling to the traditional manager. In this new world of business, managers must learn to use information in the place of authority as their primary tool. As companies increasingly become temporary institutions, the manager also must begin to explore what Drucker calls competencies: a person's abilities, likes, dislikes, and goals. If executives rise to these challenges, a new organizational foundation will be built. While a combination of rank and power supported the traditional organization, the internal structure of the emerging organization will be mutual understanding and trust.

Managers must build change into their organization's structure. This means being prepared to abandon everything that the organization does as well as constantly creating the new. Without this creation and abandonment, the organization will lose performance and with it the ability to attract and hold the people on whom its performance depends. The nature of the organization drives the imperative of change. Every organization exists to put knowledge to work, but knowledge changes quickly. The organization as well as the knowledgeable individual must acquire knowledge every several years or become obsolete. We have only begun to reckon with the implications of living in a world in which the fundamental unit of society, the organization, is and must be destabilizing. That is why questions of the organization's social responsibility now arise so often and why we need new ways to understand the relationship between organizations and their employees and between organizations and society overall.

The developed countries need a productivity revolution in knowledge and service work. The country that first achieves such gains will dominate the economic landscape in the next century. The key to this new productivity revolution is closely examining work in five distinct steps: 1) defining the task; 2) concentrating on the task; 3) defining performance; 4) getting worker input on productivity improvement; and 5) building continuous learning into the organization.

The 20 largest U.S. pension funds hold 10% of the equity capital of the largest U.S. companies, and, in total, pension funds have assets worth $2.5 trillion. They have grown to the extent that they must now address two issues: for what should corporate management be held accountable, and how should accountability be structured? Some answers can be found by looking at Germany and Japan, where ownership is even more concentrated than in the United States. These countries define performance results by maximizing the wealth-producing capacity of the enterprise.

Four concepts--statistical quality control, the new manufacturing accounting, the "flotilla" organization of the manufacturing process, and systems design--are transforming manufacturing theory. This new theory sees the factory as little more than a wide place in the stream of producing value, rather than as a collection of machines isolated from the rest of the business. Manufacturing and business decisions are one and the same. Though these concepts represent different constituencies with different agendas, together they are reconciling classic conflicts of twentieth century mass production.

The Salvation Army's effectiveness is characteristic of the best nonprofit organizations; in motivating knowledge workers and raising their productivity they are pioneers. In successful nonprofit enterprises amateurs are being replaced with unpaid staff members, many of whom are managers and professionals in their for-pay jobs. They volunteer because they believe in the mission; they stay because they are given responsibility for meaningful tasks, held accountable for their performance and rewarded with training and the chance to take on more demanding assignments.

The truly important challenges managers face are caused by the success of management itself. Management has transformed the economic and social fabric of the developed world by applying knowledge to every aspect of work. Knowledge, not bricks and mortar, is the center of capital investment and society's chief resource. Amid so much change, management's essential task remains the same--to enable people to work together so that their strengths are magnified and their differences minimized.

Twenty years from now, the typical large business will have half the levels of management and one third the managers of its counterpart today. Work will be done by specialists brought together in task forces that cut across traditional departments. Coordination and control will depend largely on employees' willingness to discipline themselves. Behind these changes lies information technology. Information-based organizations pose their own management challenges: motivating and rewarding specialists; creating a vision to unify an organization of specialists; devising a management structure that works with task forces; and ensuring the supply, preparation, and testing of top management people.

People decisions are long lasting in their consequences and difficult to unmake. At most one third of such decisions come out right. Executives who take their people decisions seriously will find the following principles helpful: 1) take responsibility for the decision--if the person the executive places in a position does not perform, the executive has made a mistake; 2) it is the duty of managers to make sure that the responsible persons in their organizations perform; 3) make the decision well; 4) don't give new people major new assignments. There are also some basic steps managers can follow in making effective promotion and staffing decisions.

Small new businesses have in recent years increasingly provided the bulk of new jobs, a trend that has accelerated during the recession. In fact, these businesses have replaced older established companies as the primary driving force behind the growth of the U.S. economy. Technological advances, capital availability, and demographic shifts have encouraged these new entrepreneurs to challenge conventional wisdom and to experiment with new approaches to the market. The author explains why the entrepreneurial economy is a cultural and psychological event as well as an economic and a technological one.

To many business people and public officials in the West, the postwar success of the Japanese economy is both an impressive and a puzzling achievement. The success is obvious and measurable; the reasons for it, far less so. Seeking explanations, Western observers often fasten with wide-eyed enthusiasm on the mysterious workings of "Japan, Inc.," that fabled edifice of business-government cooperation. To it they ascribe a continuous application of single-minded energy; from it they expect a continual flow of industrial miracles. In this article, Peter Drucker, long recognized as an authority on Japanese business, takes pointed issue with this familiar myth. No such thing exists, he argues, at least not in the form commonly attributed to it. The accomplishments of Japanese industry are the result not of some all-powerful structure but of Japan's having defined more ably than any other industrial nation some of the essential rules for managing complex organizations in the modern world.