A Class with Drucker - Headway | Work on yourself

192 ■ A CLASS WITH DRUCKER
However,” <strong>Drucker</strong> added, “even if you feel that you are able to identify all
the relevant factors and would like to develop an actual Management
Control Panel for your company, I caution you about beginning this project
until we discuss the concept thoroughly in class.”
Peter then went on to another topic. It was hard for me to follow his
lecture that evening. I kept thinking of the incredible possibilities of the
Management Control Panel.
I devoted more time that week to thinking about the Management
Control Panel than I had many past assignments. I reviewed my textbooks
from different classes covering other functional disciplines of management
and eagerly noted potential internal and external inputs that should be
included because they clearly affected the performance output.
I also talked <strong>with</strong> several managers <strong>with</strong>in my own company, McDonnell
Douglas Astronautics Company. Although computer systems were
not my area of expertise, I knew that a large amount of data was collected
and analyzed in the marketing department in which I worked. I got all the
information I could. Remember, this was several years before the rise of
the information systems or chief information officers. They just didn’t
exist at this time.
We were using a lot of this information in our decision making, but it
was not integrated <strong>with</strong> other functional areas, as suggested by the president
in Peter’s case study. It certainly wasn’t formatted in such a manner
that it would automatically yield the required actions to be taken, based on
the constraints of the situations and the resources inputted by the company.
Harvard Business School’s Three Inputs
During that week, I also had an interesting discussion <strong>with</strong> an individual
who was not a Claremont student but <strong>with</strong> whom I had become acquainted.
He was out of work at the time and seeking a position as president of a
firm. Because he had heard that I had worked as a headhunter previously,
he asked my advice to help him <strong>with</strong> his job campaign.
This individual had an MBA from Harvard, then, as now, considered
one of the leading business schools in the country. This man had an interesting
problem. In those days, Harvard used the case-study method exclusively.
According to my acquaintance, this method was followed because it
was considered the best way of putting the student in the driver’s seat as
president of a company facing various challenges. Harvard’s objective was
the education of future company presidents, not lower-level managers.