Management as a Liberal Art

Rick Wartzman wrote in this 2009 The Drucker Difference column at Bloomberg Businessweek.

'''Action and Applications Management "deals with action and application; and its test is its results. This makes it a technology," [Peter] Drucker explained in The New Realities. "But management also deals with people, their values, their growth and development—and this makes it a humanity…. Management is thus what tradition used to call a 'liberal art': 'liberal' because it deals with the fundamentals of knowledge, self-knowledge, wisdom, and leadership; 'art' because it is practice and application.

'''"Managers," Drucker continued, "draw on all the knowledge and insights of the humanities and the social sciences—on psychology and philosophy, on economics and on history, on the physical sciences and on ethics."

'''That too many corporations and other institutions have lost sight of this is painfully obvious today.'''