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  3. In The New Realities , the late Peter Drucker, described management as a "liberal art" that is, the application of knowledge, se

In The New Realities , the late Peter Drucker, described management as a "liberal art" that is, the application of knowledge, se

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问题     In The New Realities , the late Peter Drucker, described management as a "liberal art" that is, the application of knowledge, self-knowledge and wisdom to achieve an effective result. The context, argued Drucker, the first serious chronicler of modern business, was that management had become a social and not just a business function.【F1】Redefining management in this way, drawing on the insights of the humanities to illuminate present needs and how to meet them, would help solve the existential crisis brought on by management’s very success: what gives it its legitimacy? To whom is it accountable, and for what?
    If it has not turned out quite like that, it is because Drucker, though far-sighted, made one spectacular miscalculation;【F2】he believed the power and wealth of capitalists were declining, to the point where "if all the super-rich of the developed countries suddenly disappeared, the world economy would not even notice it". How wrong can that be? In fact, the power and wealth of business have increased so much that the business form of management has driven out any other possibility.
    Ironically, the failure of the "liberal art" project endangers business as much as the other institutions to which management is applied.【F3】As Drucker was well aware, shareholder value does not confer management legitimacy—another of his sayings was that free enterprise could not be justified as an end in itself, only as the means to a good society—all too often encouraging the accumulation of corporate power and takeovers "sacrificing long-range, wealth-producing capacity to short-term gains".
    In terms of creativity, it takes a positive outlier such as Apple to show what business is missing. Steve Jobs was explicit that Apple’s distinctiveness and success were in large part due to its conscious marrying of the liberal arts and the physical sciences. Echoing Drucker, Jobs once described the role of technology as solving problems that the humanities decided should be solved.
    By now management has long abandoned the search for legitimacy.【F4】While in mechanical systems bigger is better, in biological ones size follows function, so Drucker thought that "in an information-based society, bigness becomes a ’function’ and a dependent, rather than independent, variable". The smallest effective size would be best. Here, too, though, he was wrong. In fact, companies have just gone on getting bigger, like cancer cells reproducing beyond control until, as the financial sector did in 2008, they imperil the economy and wider polity as a whole.
    That the great questions of legitimacy and accountability still needed to be asked was for Drucker both a measure of managers’ success and their great indictment. Had he lived to see the crash he would have considered them even more urgent.【F5】Now more than ever, the world needs his concept of management as a liberal art, to focus "the wisdom and beauty of the past on the needs and ugliness of the present" and "to make the ’humanities’ again what they ought to be; lights to make us see and guides to right action".
【F4】
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答案尽管在机械系统中大的总是更好，但在生物学系统，大小的重要性却排在功能之后，因此德鲁克认为，“在信息化社会，‘大小’变成了一个‘函数’，一种‘因变量’而非‘自变量”’。
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