Driving Sustainability to Business Success: The DS FactorManagement System Integration and Automation

CHAPTER 12 Step One: Identify

Understanding the Organization

What is the purpose of your organization? To serve your customers.

The first section of this book gave you as a leader an opportunity to Assess-Reflect-Act on principles relevant to your organization. The questions we as managers ask ourselves or others helps us determine where we are in our organization and where we need to be.

Five Most Important Questions

Peter Ferdinand Drucker, an Austrian-born American management consultant, educator, and author of 40 books and thousands of articles, was a leader in management education and invented the concept known as “management by objectives.” He was well known in Japan, where he was considered similar to W. Edwards Deming, the quality guru.

Drucker’s writings state that a company’s primary responsibility is to serve its customers. Profit is not the primary goal, but rather an essential condition for the company’s continued existence. He was a consultant to senior executives for more than 50 years.

Readers may be interested in Drucker’s book called The Five Most Important Questions You Will Ever Ask about Your Organization (Wiley). Drucker’s questions for the organization are:

1. What is our mission?
2. Who is our customer?
3. What does the customer value?
4. What are our results?
5. What is our plan?

This informative book will challenge readers to take a close look at the very heart of their organizations and what drives them. It is a tool for self-assessment and transformation.