ESCP Europe

The Introduction - The Nature of Management - consists of three chapters. Within the first chapter Drucker explains that "the manager is the dynamic, life-giving element in every business" and that management "is the organ of society specifically charged with making resources productive, that is, with the responsibility for organized economic advance." In the second chapter Drucker explains that "management is the least known and the least understood of our institutions" and discusses the three functions of management: managing a business, managing managers, and to manage workers and work. The third chapter states that management faces its first test of its competence and its hardest task in the then imminent industrial revolution called `automation'. Drucker does explain that automation is not `technical', but primarily a system of concepts, a concept of the organization of work.