A Class with Drucker - Headway | Work on yourself

THE MANAGEMENT CONTROL PANEL ■ 199
“I can’t understand it. We had something like this in our industry just last
year. We made exactly the same decision and allocated proportionally just
about the same resources, but the results in this simulation came out
entirely different.” We concluded that something must be wrong <strong>with</strong> the
computer program.
Something was “wrong” <strong>with</strong> it, and now I knew exactly what. <strong>Drucker</strong>
had said that it didn’t take much deviation to create different results, and
it didn’t. I realized that you couldn’t run a business <strong>with</strong> a machine or a
computer program making the decisions and management simply implementing
what the computer said to do. The use of computers to collect
information and cross-tabulate relationships that did not vary <strong>with</strong> other
inputs was absolutely needed. But these were guidelines for taking actions
which only the manager, interpreting the computer’s results—and not the
computer itself—must make.
Our team didn’t necessarily make a mistake in our simulation game.
However, assuming similar results <strong>with</strong> identical actions when there was a
slight variance in environment is incorrect. This meant that past experience,
too, is only a guide to present action. To me, this experience also confirmed
that management was far more an art than a science.
Some years later, both Harvard and my own alma mater for my MBA
degree, the University of Chicago, modified their MBA programs extensively.
Harvard had been known for its reliance on case studies. The University
of Chicago was known as a “high quant” school, emphasizing the
quantitative end of business and making decisions based mainly on an
analysis of numbers. Both schools wisely introduced courses to round out
their curricula. These courses recognized the fact that every situation is
different, and that managers had to manage <strong>with</strong> their heads and guts as
much as they did by relying mostly on computers or past experience.
In combining these different approaches, I believe that due to Peter’s
significant input and his judgment about combining these different
approaches, Claremont was ahead of business educational theory at
that time.
<strong>Drucker</strong> Lesson Summary
The Management Control Panel that <strong>Drucker</strong> introduced us to in his
classroom sounded almost too good to be true. And it was! Technology
can do wonderful things—whether giving a pilot valuable information
needed to help fly his plane or providing sales projections based on