The Business Administration, for years, has been based on the basis of Taylor and Fayol, who for all of us Administrators, are a kind of column that support the building of knowledge that we are building on the different practices and actions that must be adopted when time to exercise administration.
Taylor with his "theory of scientific organization of work" came to be considered as the father of the Scientific Administration. His main contributions were: division of labor, standardization of tools, movement studies, among others.
For his part, Fayol studies Taylor's work, and with his experiences as administrator, he makes substantial contributions to administrative thought. It defined three fundamental aspects for the good development of the administration, which are: The division of labor (adopted from Taylor's thought), the administrative process and formulation of technical criteria.
These contributions made by Fayol, show that after the passage of time, the environment around us changes, and therefore the conditions in which a company must be run as well.
This is why in the future the administration world has found other great contributions, among which I want to highlight Peter Drucker, an Austrian who decided to make contributions to the Administration and adapt his orientation to the reality of the 21st century..
Drucker has made great contributions in the world of managment, among which are the concepts of "privatization", "entrepreneurship", "objectives", "knowledge society" or "postmodernity" that were masterfully developed by the author.
Drucker, defines us with great assertiveness the precepts that make modern administration a more complex activity, but in turn, more fascinating and much more important.
But, if the world has changed, why hasn't the administration philosophy changed? Is it feasible for companies to work under the arguments of the already old philosophy of the administration?
In his book, The Post-Capitalist Society, Peter Drucker makes a statement that I would like to share with you:
The industries that in the last 50 years have come to occupy the center of the economy are those whose business is the production and distribution of knowledge, and not the production and distribution of objects.
This statement by Drucker is, without fear of being mistaken, an x-ray of the reality that exists today in the business world, most of the companies with international dominance, are companies dedicated to knowledge, we have the case of Carlos Slim and its communications companies, or the Bill Gates and Windows case, also the deceased Steve Jobs and Apple, all own companies linked to knowledge and playing a dominant role in the new era of business.
In this situation, we have to ask ourselves: Should Business Administration follow its philosophy of "minimizing costs and maximizing benefits"?
The contemporary world hits this philosophy every day that administrators are taught as a law of life. Imagine that Carlos Slim had applied this philosophy. Would he be the richest man in the world today? Of course not, because today's world requires large investments in Research, Training and in the management or implementation of innovations made by investigators.
The administration must continue to change, it must continue to adapt to reality, we cannot continue to think that by spending little we will obtain many benefits, in the knowledge society, quality costs money, human resources are not like before, they are knowledge managers and therefore they know what they are worth, so that, if we want to be successful as administrators, it is necessary, as Drucker says in his book Management in the Future Society "To combine three things simultaneously: Improve, Extend and Innovate" and to fulfill with this you have to invest with a broad vision.
The current dilemma for managers is to make the companies they run competitive. The term "competitiveness" that has become fashionable in the globalized world, means the following: "ability of a company or country to obtain profitability in the market in relation to its competitors", seen from that point of view the term no it would bring nothing new to the lives of managers. This term takes value when the market becomes very competitive, which is what is happening.
The fact of living in a globalized world where knowledge has been democratized and where tariff barriers are removed through trade agreements, leads many companies to lose competitiveness, this happens because they did not prepare for the reality of the globalized world.
Why did they not prepare?
I think that many did not prepare because this warranted an investment that would not give results in the short term, so they decided to continue making profits without increasing the cost of their operations and left aside investments in new technologies and research.
But who was wrong? Wasn't that what they were taught as management principles? Weren't they maximizing benefits and minimizing costs?
It is evident that they thought they were doing the right thing, and if they thought it, they did it on the basis of what they had learned, and it is important to point out that in other times, perhaps it would have worked, but as I have said on other occasions, just like that life, the administration also evolves and changes reality.
The reality of Fayol was not that of Taylor, that of Drucker was not Fayol and that of the authors and administrators of these times is not that of Drucker either, the world changes constantly and the more time passes, the less the lapse in which the realities change.
The challenge that administrators of the present have is to have a broad vision of the reality of the world in which they operate, this will allow them to have a greater degree of competitiveness in this world where barriers are increasingly removed.
To achieve competitiveness and therefore permanence in the business world, you have to invest but invest with a broad vision.
