The Concept of the Corporation
by Peter F. Drucker · first published 1946
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…organizations were designed and managed for over 50 years - they were the first to ever systematically design and execute a managed, decentralized organization of that magnitude. Peter Drucker's 1946 classic "Concept of the Corporation" was the first major study of a large corporation (GM) and a deep analysis of the implications that the new "society of organizations" would have on our culture, politics, and lives. Sloan's "My Years…
on “How General Motors Was Really Saved” ↗…complexity. Beyond some point, connectivity problems started to choke the organization. There were classic ways around this, mainly dividing companies into sub-companies with their own profit lines. "The Concept of the Corporation" by Peter Drucker describes how General Motors did that. GM was at the time a group of loosely connected car companies under one corporate roof. A few companies figured out scaling early. Sears was famous…
on “Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore” ↗…Issuing an edict in a crisis doesn't necessarily imply centralization if the member nodes can ignore the edict. In the history of organization structures, for example, Peter Drucker in 1946 wrote the "Concept of the Corporation", a study on General Motors, which was arguably one of the early detailed studies of Decentralized governance in an organization.
on “Critical Update on DAO Vulnerability” ↗…often make this point, but you can really judge the cultural transition by the careers of leading business commentators, such as Peter Drucker. In 1946 he published his study of General Motors, the book Concept of the Corporation. In it, he examined the large bureaucracy at General Motors and celebrated it as the pinnacle of human civilization, the absolute peak of what the last 6,000 years of civilization had all been building…
on “Locklin on science – Calling a bureaucrat by its name” ↗…it's not a corporation. It's not a permanent organization. This is significant. The Roman Empire, even though it had a legal system and a stable government for several centuries, never developed the concept of the corporation, or of a common carrier. They had rich individuals as sole owners, and family businesses, but not larger multi-owner organizations. Something like a multi-city merchant company was out of reach. Even…
on “A window into ancient economics” ↗…broaden their revenue stream beyond ads, without much success. This is a classic management problem. The first person to really get a handle on it was Alfred P. Sloane, who headed GM and wrote "The Concept of the Corporation". He figured out how to organize a very large company effectively, and GM's management structure worked well for half a century. They beat out everybody else until Japanese competition appeared. (GM…
on “Google Site Search will be completely shut down by April 1, 2018” ↗