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- IELTS Reading Matching Heading Features
- IELTS Reading Yes/No/Not Given
- IELTS Reading Multiple Choice Question
IELTS Reading Passage – Father of modern management
Father of Modern Management
A. Peter Drucker was one of the most important people to think about management in the last 100 years. He wrote about 40 books and thousands of articles, and he never stopped trying to show the world how important management is. “Management is a part of institutions. It is the part that turns a group of people into an organization and turns human effort into performance.” Did he do well? It was amazing how far his influence went. Drucker’s ideas can be found wherever people try to solve hard management problems. This includes big and small organizations, the public and private sectors, and, increasingly, the nonprofit sector.
B. Winston Churchill liked his first two books, The End of Economic Man (1939) and The Future of Industrial Man (1942), but academic critics didn’t like how they covered so many different topics. Still, the second of these books got people’s attention because it argued passionately that businesses had a social purpose as well as a financial one. The Concept of the Corporation, his third book, was an instant hit and has been in print ever since.
C. The two most interesting arguments in The Concept of the Corporation had very little to do with the decentralization trend. They were going to dominate his work. The first one had to do with “empowering” workers. Drucker thought that workers should be seen as resources rather than just as costs. He was a harsh critic of the assembly-line system of production, which was the most common at the time. This was partly because assembly lines moved at the speed of the slowest worker and partly because they didn’t use the creativity of individual workers. The second point had to do with the rise of knowledge workers. Drucker said that the world is moving from an “economy of goods” to an “economy of knowledge” and from a society ruled by the industrial proletariat to one ruled by brain workers. He insisted that this had huge implications for both managers and politicians. Managers had to stop treating workers like parts of a big, cold machine and start treating them like brain workers. In turn, politicians had to realize that knowledge, and therefore education, was the most important resource for any advanced society. Yet Drucker also thought that this economy had effects on knowledge workers themselves. They had to accept that they were neither “bosses” nor “workers,” but something in between entrepreneurs who had to develop their most important resource, their brainpower, and who also had to take more control of their careers, including their pension plans.
D. But his job was also hard in some ways. Drucker came up with “management by objectives,” one of the most successful ideas from the rational school of management. In 1954’s The Practice of Management, one of his most important books, he talked about how important it was for managers and businesses to set clear long-term goals and then turn those long-term goals into more immediate goals. He said that companies should have an elite group of general managers who set these long-term goals, and then another group of more specialized managers. For his critics, this was a change from the way he used to talk about the human side of management. Drucker thought that everything fit together perfectly: if you put too much faith in empowerment, you risk anarchy, and if you put too much faith in command and control, you lose creativity. Managers should set long-term goals, but then let their employees figure out how to reach those goals. Drucker may have helped make management a global field, but he also pushed it outside of business. He was a thinker about management, not just business. He thought that management is “the organ that defines all modern institutions,” not just companies.
E. Drucker’s work is often criticized for three reasons. The first is that he focused on big companies instead of small ones. In many ways, The Concept of the Corporation was a tribute to big organizations. Drucker said, “We know now that in modern industrial production, especially modern mass production, the small unit is not only inefficient, it can’t produce at all.” The book helped start the “big organization boom” that dominated business thinking for the next 20 years. The second complaint is that Drucker’s enthusiasm for management by objectives led the business down a dead end. They prefer that ideas, including ideas for long-term strategies, come from the bottom and middle of the organization, not from the top. Third, Drucker is criticized for being an outsider who is getting left behind as his field becomes more strict. There is no area of academic management theory that he made his own.
F. The first two arguments have some merit. Drucker never wrote anything else as good as The Concept of the Corporation about how entrepreneurs start businesses. Drucker’s work on “management by objectives” doesn’t fit well with his earlier and later writings on how important knowledge workers and self-directed teams are. But the third argument is short-sighted and unfair because it doesn’t take into account Drucker’s role as a pioneer in creating the modern profession of management. He made one of the first organized studies of a big company. He was the first person to suggest that ideas can help companies get going. The biggest problem with judging Drucker’s impact is that so many of his ideas have become common knowledge. He is a victim of his success. His writings about the importance of knowledge workers and giving people power may sound a bit boring now. But they weren’t boring when he first thought of them in the 1940s or when they were first used in the Anglo-Saxon world in the 1980s. In addition, Drucker kept coming up with new ideas until he was in his 90s. His work on how to run non-profit organizations remained at the cutting edge.
Father of modern management Reading Questions
Question 1-6
Reading Passage 1 has six paragraphs, A-F Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from the list below. Write the correct number, i-xi, in boxes 1-6 on your answer sheet.
List of Heading
I. Finding fault with Drucker
II. The popularity and impact of Drucker’s work
III. Government regulation of business
IV. The impact of economic globalization
V. Drucker’s rejection of big business
VI. Early publication of Drucker’s
VII. Drucker’s view of balanced management
VIII. The changing role of the employee
IX. An appreciation of the pros and cons of Drucker’s work
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Question 7-10
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 2? In boxes 7-10 on your answer sheet, write
YES- if the statement agrees with what is stated in the passage
NO- if the statement counters what is stated in the passage
NOT GIVEN- if the statement is no relevant information given in the passage
7) Drucker’s work on the management is out of date in moderns days.
8) Drucker support that workers are not simply put themselves just in the employment relationship and should develop their resources of intelligence voluntarily.
9) Drucker believed that employees should enjoy the same status as the employers in a company.
10) Drucker argued that managers and politicians will dominate the economy during a social transition.
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Question 11-14
Choose TWO letters from A-E Write your answers in boxes 24 and 25 on your answers sheet (11 & 12) Which TWO of the following are true of Drucker’s views?
- High-rank executives and workers should be put in balanced positions in management practice
- Young executives should be given chances to start from low-level jobs
- More emphasis should be laid on fostering the development of the union
- Management should facilitate workers with tools of self-appraisal instead of controlling them from the outside force
- Leaders should go beyond the scope of management details and strategically establish goals.
(13 & 14) Which TWO of the following are mentioned in the passage as criticisms to Drucker and his views?
- His lectures focus too much on big organizations and ignore the small ones.
- His lectures are too broad and lack being precise and accurate about the facts.
- He put a source of objectives more on corporate executives but not on average workers.
- He acted much like a maverick and did not set up his own management groups.
- He was overstating the case for knowledge workers when warning business to get prepared.
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Father Of Modern Management Reading Answers
1. ii
2. vi
3. ix
4. Vii
5. i
6. V
7. No
8. Yes
9. Not Given
10. Not Given
11 & 12. A and E
13 & 14. A and C
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