On Decisions and their “Agents”
December 17, 2025
This essay was inspired by an article recently published by Karen Linkletter and Pooya Tabesh (2025). They were in search of the meaning of “decision” in the works of Peter Drucker. To this end, they used Python to identify and locate all the times the word, “decision”, came up in Peter Drucker’s
oeuvre
. They then characterized the contexts (“themes”) in which the word came up. The result was a nuanced but very clear characterization of the evolution of his thinking on the topic.
Here, we will focus on a key theme for Drucker: the case where your decisions involve other people’s decisions and actions . For present purposes, we can start with their statement:
One of Drucker’s valuable contributions to the literature on decision-making is his adamance that implementation be built into the decision-making process.” (Linkletter and Tabesh 2025 8) To be clear, “…it is not a surprise that his integration of implementation of and commitment to decisions is part of his process of decision-making. He argues that a decision “has not been made until it has been realized in action.” (2025 8)
The question, therefore, is how to make this happen, how to turn an organization from an aggregate of individuals whose decisions may or may not be aligned, into an agent—an entity that makes decisions, implements them, and then ascertains that what was done was, in fact, what was decided, as we try to do when making purely individual decisions.
Let’s look at the matter more closely…
A few years ago, I read a story about a road crew that was painting a double-yellow line on a highway. In their path was a dead raccoon that had been hit by a car or truck. It was lying right in the middle of the road. The crew didn’t stop. Someone later took a picture of the dead raccoon with a double-yellow line freshly painted right over it. The picture is below. It went viral on the Internet.
Here, we will focus on a key theme for Drucker: the case where your decisions involve other people’s decisions and actions . For present purposes, we can start with their statement:
One of Drucker’s valuable contributions to the literature on decision-making is his adamance that implementation be built into the decision-making process.” (Linkletter and Tabesh 2025 8) To be clear, “…it is not a surprise that his integration of implementation of and commitment to decisions is part of his process of decision-making. He argues that a decision “has not been made until it has been realized in action.” (2025 8)
The question, therefore, is how to make this happen, how to turn an organization from an aggregate of individuals whose decisions may or may not be aligned, into an agent—an entity that makes decisions, implements them, and then ascertains that what was done was, in fact, what was decided, as we try to do when making purely individual decisions.
Let’s look at the matter more closely…
A few years ago, I read a story about a road crew that was painting a double-yellow line on a highway. In their path was a dead raccoon that had been hit by a car or truck. It was lying right in the middle of the road. The crew didn’t stop. Someone later took a picture of the dead raccoon with a double-yellow line freshly painted right over it. The picture is below. It went viral on the Internet.
Think about this for a moment. The road crew doing the painting must have either worked for a state agency or for a company large enough to do business with the state government. In either case, their organization probably had a mission statement and a strategic plan. It almost surely had formal policies and procedures, a budget, and a management hierarchy spread out over several management disciplines. If it had these things in place, you could bet it had a human resources department with hiring policies, job descriptions, and a performance management process. It probably had key performance indicators (KPIs) and watched these closely. Now, think of the total of these policies, procedures, budgetary constraints, strategic objectives, and KPIs as the “business plan” of this company or agency. You can be sure that its upper management was committed to this business plan, and that the middle and lower levels were committed, too, or at least they “bought into” it.
The reality of a business plan, from the customer’s standpoint, is in the products and services they buy from the company. The customer doesn’t care about management’s intentions or their PowerPoint presentations. The customer cares about what the operating employees produce. The thoughts and actions of these people, when they’re on the job, are the truth of the company’s business plan. The real business plan of a company is whatever it is that carry around in their heads, guiding them as they work. That’s the business plan the customer sees.
So, it is reasonable to ask what was in the minds of the operators who painted over that dead raccoon in the middle of the road? Were they understaffed that day and just didn’t see the roadkill? Or did they see it, but were afraid that if they stopped moving, their feet-per-hour metric would suffer? Or were they too busy doing something else, like texting their friends, to notice that a dead raccoon was in their path? Or did they see it, but were just too lazy to stop, thinking that they could get away with it because it wouldn’t show up on management’s radar? Maybe they saw the raccoon but just painted over it because they thought it was funny. Whatever “plans” they were carrying around in their heads, those plans enabled them to paint a double-yellow line over a dead raccoon in the middle of a highway.
You can be pretty sure that the management of their company or agency wasn’t too happy about any of this, especially since they probably found out about it the way I did—on the Internet. You can be certain that they didn’t intend any of their road crews to paint dead raccoons yellow, or any other color. Somewhere, in between the company’s mission statement and the work of the road crew, there was a “disconnect.” Something fell between the cracks. The business plan formulated by management was one thing. Its reality, as lived out by at least one road crew, was another.
Drucker understood the hazards of decision-making hierarchies. His remedy, first stated in his The Practice of Management (1954), was “management by objectives” (MBO). According to it, the objectives were to be decided by supervisors and their subordinates in a conversation where both parties enjoyed a “right to speak,” with a correlative obligation to “listen.” The idea was to get the “agent”—the organization—to commit, from top to bottom, to those decisions, and to embed them, by way of the MBO process, into the work decisions of everyone. Often enough, MBO works for managers. In the best of cases, it aligns their efforts and creates a managerial esprit de corps . I searched The Practice of Managemen t—in vain—for a reference to the possibility of pushing the conversation all the way down to the operative level. That said, it would not surprise me if the managers of that road crew all had their “MBOs.” It’s just that the series of conversations didn’t go all the way to the bottom. Perhaps if it had, we would not have had that splendid photograph to guide this discussion.
The main insight I got from reading Linkletter and Tabesh’s (2025) paper is that Drucker’s theory of decision-making did not stop with the intellectual work of transforming information and strategic principles into an output called a decision. When you’re the only one making and executing a decision, it boils down to your wanting to do it and having the resources you need to get it done. It’s simple. But when you need other people to get it done, you cannot assume that their decisions will be in line with yours. Implementation is more complicated than that. Drucker realized that the “whole thing,” which includes the execution of the decision, is an essential part of the decision-making process. He found a way to make the organization into an agent , ideally in the same sense as you and I are agents, by way of his MBO. This makes an organization more than just an aggregate of individuals whose positions and names appear on an organization chart.
In this sense, Drucker’s concept was revolutionary. It can’t just be all about a smart guy making the decisions, then telling subordinates what to do, and then following up, kicking ass and taking names…unless he’s OK with the occasional line-striped roadkill.
The reader might see the example under discussion here as extreme. It is. But how many lesser versions of line-striped roadkill are there in the world of organizations, large and small? When I was a consultant, I spent about thirty years helping my clients identify and fix the root causes of many kinds of problems, which often stemmed from the disconnect between plans made at the top and their execution at the operative level, at the level where human beings make the “last turn of the screw.” The solution usually, at least in part, involved getting the operatives actively engaged in a “business planning conversation” of sorts, in which they wound up making verbal commitments in the presence of their bosses and peers. Having done so, they exerted effort to comply with the “plan.” They did this partly because they didn’t want to “look bad” to the others in whose presence they said what they should do to make things better. Nobody likes to be called out with some equivalent of “I thought you said…” But in addition, since they “spoke” the plan, they were likely to experience it “inwardly” as a personal commitment. They were co-owners of the decision. And from this commitment came an increase in efforts to do the right things for the “good of the business.” As a precondition, they needed to see that it was also good for them . That was a key part of the “sell.”
It doesn’t matter whether the operatives are assembly workers, or software engineers, or college professors. In those roles, we are all workers. Most of us want to have a seat at the table, to be taken seriously when we share our thoughts, and to have a visible impact on decisions that affect us as we do our work. We don’t want a “sense” of participation. We want the real thing. To the extent that we get that, our organizations can become agents, not just aggregates of individuals.
Reference Linkletter, Karen and Tabesh, Pooya. (2025) A historical evaluation of Peter Drucker’s contribution to decision-making thought. Journal of Management History . DOI 10.1108/JMH-09-2024-0140.
The reality of a business plan, from the customer’s standpoint, is in the products and services they buy from the company. The customer doesn’t care about management’s intentions or their PowerPoint presentations. The customer cares about what the operating employees produce. The thoughts and actions of these people, when they’re on the job, are the truth of the company’s business plan. The real business plan of a company is whatever it is that carry around in their heads, guiding them as they work. That’s the business plan the customer sees.
So, it is reasonable to ask what was in the minds of the operators who painted over that dead raccoon in the middle of the road? Were they understaffed that day and just didn’t see the roadkill? Or did they see it, but were afraid that if they stopped moving, their feet-per-hour metric would suffer? Or were they too busy doing something else, like texting their friends, to notice that a dead raccoon was in their path? Or did they see it, but were just too lazy to stop, thinking that they could get away with it because it wouldn’t show up on management’s radar? Maybe they saw the raccoon but just painted over it because they thought it was funny. Whatever “plans” they were carrying around in their heads, those plans enabled them to paint a double-yellow line over a dead raccoon in the middle of a highway.
You can be pretty sure that the management of their company or agency wasn’t too happy about any of this, especially since they probably found out about it the way I did—on the Internet. You can be certain that they didn’t intend any of their road crews to paint dead raccoons yellow, or any other color. Somewhere, in between the company’s mission statement and the work of the road crew, there was a “disconnect.” Something fell between the cracks. The business plan formulated by management was one thing. Its reality, as lived out by at least one road crew, was another.
Drucker understood the hazards of decision-making hierarchies. His remedy, first stated in his The Practice of Management (1954), was “management by objectives” (MBO). According to it, the objectives were to be decided by supervisors and their subordinates in a conversation where both parties enjoyed a “right to speak,” with a correlative obligation to “listen.” The idea was to get the “agent”—the organization—to commit, from top to bottom, to those decisions, and to embed them, by way of the MBO process, into the work decisions of everyone. Often enough, MBO works for managers. In the best of cases, it aligns their efforts and creates a managerial esprit de corps . I searched The Practice of Managemen t—in vain—for a reference to the possibility of pushing the conversation all the way down to the operative level. That said, it would not surprise me if the managers of that road crew all had their “MBOs.” It’s just that the series of conversations didn’t go all the way to the bottom. Perhaps if it had, we would not have had that splendid photograph to guide this discussion.
The main insight I got from reading Linkletter and Tabesh’s (2025) paper is that Drucker’s theory of decision-making did not stop with the intellectual work of transforming information and strategic principles into an output called a decision. When you’re the only one making and executing a decision, it boils down to your wanting to do it and having the resources you need to get it done. It’s simple. But when you need other people to get it done, you cannot assume that their decisions will be in line with yours. Implementation is more complicated than that. Drucker realized that the “whole thing,” which includes the execution of the decision, is an essential part of the decision-making process. He found a way to make the organization into an agent , ideally in the same sense as you and I are agents, by way of his MBO. This makes an organization more than just an aggregate of individuals whose positions and names appear on an organization chart.
In this sense, Drucker’s concept was revolutionary. It can’t just be all about a smart guy making the decisions, then telling subordinates what to do, and then following up, kicking ass and taking names…unless he’s OK with the occasional line-striped roadkill.
The reader might see the example under discussion here as extreme. It is. But how many lesser versions of line-striped roadkill are there in the world of organizations, large and small? When I was a consultant, I spent about thirty years helping my clients identify and fix the root causes of many kinds of problems, which often stemmed from the disconnect between plans made at the top and their execution at the operative level, at the level where human beings make the “last turn of the screw.” The solution usually, at least in part, involved getting the operatives actively engaged in a “business planning conversation” of sorts, in which they wound up making verbal commitments in the presence of their bosses and peers. Having done so, they exerted effort to comply with the “plan.” They did this partly because they didn’t want to “look bad” to the others in whose presence they said what they should do to make things better. Nobody likes to be called out with some equivalent of “I thought you said…” But in addition, since they “spoke” the plan, they were likely to experience it “inwardly” as a personal commitment. They were co-owners of the decision. And from this commitment came an increase in efforts to do the right things for the “good of the business.” As a precondition, they needed to see that it was also good for them . That was a key part of the “sell.”
It doesn’t matter whether the operatives are assembly workers, or software engineers, or college professors. In those roles, we are all workers. Most of us want to have a seat at the table, to be taken seriously when we share our thoughts, and to have a visible impact on decisions that affect us as we do our work. We don’t want a “sense” of participation. We want the real thing. To the extent that we get that, our organizations can become agents, not just aggregates of individuals.
Reference Linkletter, Karen and Tabesh, Pooya. (2025) A historical evaluation of Peter Drucker’s contribution to decision-making thought. Journal of Management History . DOI 10.1108/JMH-09-2024-0140.
Peter Drucker’s memoir, Adventures of a Bystander, is a self-portrait of a most unusual kind. It reveals its subject not through direct autobiography, but through a series of incisive portraits of the people he encountered throughout a tumultuous life. Drucker positions himself as a "bystander," but this is no passive observer. Instead, he is an intellectual portraitist whose careful study of others becomes the very method by which he comes to understand himself and the fractured world he inhabited.
When Paul Polman became CEO of Unilever in 2009, he did not inherit a troubled company. He stepped into a large global enterprise with familiar consumer brands that sat on shelves in cities from Amsterdam to Manila. Even with that scale and reach, the business rested on foundations that were beginning to crack. Public faith in multinational firms was fading, climate change was moving from a distant worry to a financial reality, and investors were increasingly locked into the rhythm of quarterly results that encouraged short term decisions and discouraged real strategy.
Peter Drucker suggested that readers view his first three books as a unified body of work: The End of Economic Man(1939), The Future of Industrial Man (1942), and Concept of the Corporation (1946). These works share a common theme: politics. Drucker did not think about politics like scholars who strictly follow modern social science norms. Instead, he viewed politics as part of social ecology and understood political events through the dynamic changes in social ecology. Despite having "corporation" in its title and using General Motors as a case study, Concept of the Corporation is indeed a book about politics. In this work, Drucker attempts to address the main issues that industrial society must resolve: the legitimacy of managerial authority, the status and function of managers and workers, and the power structure of society and organizations. In Drucker's own words, this is a book exploring the specific principles of industrial society. Corresponding to these specific social principles, Drucker had earlier attempted to develop a general social theory, which was the aim of The End of Economic Man and The Future of Industrial Man. The subtitle of The End of Economic Man is "The Origins of Totalitarianism." The book focuses on how society disintegrates in industrial societies and how totalitarianism rises. For Drucker, the real challenge of this topic isn't explaining how Hitler and Mussolini came to power, nor the actions of Germany and Italy in government, military, and economic spheres. Rather, it's understanding why some Europeans accepted clearly absurd totalitarian ideologies, and why others seemed potentially receptive to them. Drucker's writing style is argumentative. He clearly knew that to effectively advance his arguments, he needed to engage with popular theories of his time. Back then, there were two main explanatory approaches to Nazism and Fascism, which Drucker termed "illusions." Some viewed totalitarianism as ordinary political turmoil similar to previous historical revolutions. In their view, totalitarianism was characterized merely by cruelty, disruption of order, propaganda, and manipulation. Others considered totalitarianism a phenomenon unique to Germany and Italy, related to their specific national characters. Drucker thoroughly refuted explanations based on "national character." He believed that any historical approach appealing to "national character" was pseudo-history. Such theories always emphasize that certain events were inevitable in certain places. But all claims of "inevitability" negate human free will and thus deny politics: without human choice, there is no politics. If the rise of totalitarianism were inevitable, there would be no need or possibility to oppose it. Viewing totalitarianism as an ordinary revolution is equally dangerous. This thinking merely emphasizes how bad Nazis and Fascists were. But the real issue is that Europeans were not merely submitting out of fear—they were actually attracted to totalitarianism. And those attracted weren't just the ignorant masses but also well-educated intellectual elites, especially the younger generation. The world cannot defeat totalitarianism through contempt alone, especially if that contempt stems from ignorance. Understanding the enemy is a prerequisite to defeating it. Drucker identified three main characteristics of Nazism and Fascism (totalitarianism is a social type, with Nazism and Fascism being its representatives in industrialized Europe): 1. The complete rejection of freedom and equality, which are the core beliefs of European civilization, without offering any positive alternative beliefs. 2. The complete rejection of the promise of legitimate power. Power must have legitimacy—this is a long-standing tradition in European politics. For power to have legitimacy means that it makes a commitment to the fundamental beliefs of civilization. Totalitarianism denied all European beliefs, thereby liberating power from the burden of responsibility. 3. The discovery and exploitation of mass psychology: in times of absolute despair, the more absurd something is, the more people are willing to believe it. The End of Economic Man develops a diagnosis of totalitarianism around these three characteristics. Drucker offers a deeper insight: totalitarianism is actually a solution to many chronic problems in industrial society. At a time when European industrial society was on the verge of collapse, totalitarians at least identified the problems and offered some solutions. This is why they possessed such magical appeal. Why did totalitarianism completely reject the basic beliefs of European civilization? Drucker's answer: neither traditional capitalism nor Marxist socialism could fulfill their promises of freedom and equality. "Economic Man" in Drucker's book has a different meaning than in Adam Smith's work. "Economic Man" refers to people living in capitalist or socialist societies who believe that through economic progress, a free and equal world would "automatically" emerge. The reality was that capitalism's economic freedom exacerbated social inequality, while socialism not only failed to eliminate inequality but created an even more rigid privileged class. Since neither capitalism nor socialism could "automatically" realize freedom and equality, Europeans lost faith in both systems. Simultaneously, they lost faith in freedom and equality themselves. Throughout European history, people sought freedom and equality in different social domains. In the 19th century, people projected their pursuit of freedom and equality onto the economic sphere. The industrial realities of the 20th century, along with the Great Depression and war, shattered these hopes. People didn't know where else to look for freedom and equality. The emerging totalitarianism offered a subversive answer: freedom and equality aren't worth pursuing; race and the leader are the true beliefs. Why did totalitarianism reject the promise of power legitimacy? One reason was that political power abandoned its responsibility to European core beliefs. Another reason came from the new realities of industrial society. Drucker held a lifelong view: the key distinction between industrial society and 19th-century commercial society was the separation of ownership and management. The role of capitalists was no longer important. Those who truly dominated the social industrial sphere were corporate managers and executives. These people effectively held decisive power but had not gained political and social status matching their power. When a class's power and political status don't match, it doesn't know how to properly use its power. Drucker believed this was a problem all industrial societies must solve. Totalitarianism keenly perceived this issue. The Nazis maintained property rights for business owners but brought the management of factories and companies under government control. This way, social power and political power became unified. This unified power was no longer restricted or regulated—it became the rule itself. Why could totalitarianism make the masses believe absurd things? Because Europeans had nothing left to believe in. Each individual can only understand society and their own life when they have status and function. Those thrown out of normal life by the Great Depression and war lost their status and function. For them, society was a desperate dark jungle. Even those who temporarily kept their jobs didn't know the meaning of their current life. The Nazi system could provide a sense of meaning in this vacuum of meaning—though false, it was timely. Using the wartime economic system, the Nazis created stable employment in a short time. In the Nazi industrial system, both business owners and workers were exploited. But outside the industrial production system, Nazis created various revolutionary organizations and movements. In those organizations and movements, poor workers became leaders, while business owners and professors became servants. In the hysterical revolutionary fervor, people regained status and function. Economic interests were no longer important, freedom and equality were no longer important; being involved in the revolution (status) and dying for it (function) became life's meaning. The Nazis replaced the calm and shrewd "Economic Man" with the hysterical "Heroic Man." Though absurd, this new concept of humanity had appeal. What people needed was not rationality but a sense of meaning that could temporarily fill the void. Those theorists who despised totalitarianism only emphasized its evil. Drucker, however, emphasized its appeal. He viewed totalitarianism as one solution to the crisis of industrial society. From 19th-century commercial society to 20th-century industrial society, the reality of society changed dramatically. 19th-century ideas, institutions, and habits could not solve 20th-century problems. Capitalism could not fulfill its promises about freedom and equality, and neither could Marxism. It was at this point that totalitarianism emerged. Nazism and Fascism attempted to build a new society in a way completely different from European civilization. Drucker said the real danger was not that they couldn't succeed, but that they almost did. They addressed the relationship between political power and social power, proposed alternative beliefs to freedom and equality (though only negative ones), and on this basis provided social members with new status and function. The war against totalitarianism cannot be waged merely through contempt. Defeating totalitarianism is not just a battlefield matter. Those who hate totalitarianism and love freedom must find better solutions than totalitarianism to build a normally functioning and free industrial society. Totalitarianism gave wrong and evil answers. But they at least asked the right questions. Industrial society must address several issues: the legitimacy of power (government power and social power), individual status and function, and society's basic beliefs. These issues became the fundamental threads in Drucker's exploration of industrial society reconstruction in The Future of Industrial Man. The Future of Industrial Man: From Totalitarian Diagnosis to General Social Theory Both The End of Economic Man and The Future of Industrial Man feature the prose style of 19th-century historians. Even today, readers can appreciate the author's profound historical knowledge and wise historical commentary. For today's readers, the real challenge of these two books lies in Drucker's theoretical interests. He doesn't simply narrate history but organizes and explains historical facts using his unique beliefs and methods. In The End of Economic Man, Drucker developed his diagnosis of totalitarianism around three issues: power legitimacy, individual status-function, and society's basic beliefs. In The Future of Industrial Man, he also constructs a general social theory around these three issues. In "What Is A Functioning Society," Drucker explains three sets of tensions that exist in social ecology:
Last semester, two students approached me to advise their AI-based graduate projects at a time when no one else in the department was available or willing to take them on. Our department lacked sufficient faculty with software or AI specialization at the time to support the growing number of requests in this area.
When Marc Benioff founded Salesforce in 1999, Silicon Valley had a pretty straightforward playbook which was technological disruption at any cost. Profit, scale, and market capture dominated corporate ambition. Benioff, who worked under Steve Jobs at Apple and explored Buddhist philosophy, was not satisfied with that approach. He envisioned a company that would not only revolutionize enterprise software through the cloud but also redefine the social purpose of business itself. His leadership at Salesforce reflects Peter Drucker's concept of Management as a Liberal Art (MLA). This idea holds that management is not just about efficiency or growth, but about making work human, creating meaning, and building institutions that serve society (Drucker, 1989).
What is Soft Power?
Previously, I shared de Tocqueville’s concept of equality of condition and how it is manifesting in today’s perception that democracy has failed to deliver on its promise of economic and social equality for all. Promises of economic equality are impossible to fulfill; but democratic societies can and should offer all of their members dignity and a sense of purpose. In this final installment, I’ll share de Tocqueville’s prescriptions for shoring up the institutions of a democratic society – as well as some of his warnings about challenges that democracies face.
Over the past two decades, there has been a discernible shift in the professional workforce. Increasingly, individuals have chosen to leave traditional corporate environments in favor of smaller ventures, entrepreneurial efforts, and purpose-driven careers. This migration has been fueled by a desire for greater autonomy, meaningful impact, and freedom from the rigidity of hierarchical organizational structures. As the world continues to undergo sweeping changes—economic, technological, and social—professionals are finding themselves at a crossroads. The COVID-19 pandemic only accelerated this reckoning, forcing people across industries to reevaluate their relationship with work, identity, and independence.
In Part I of this series, I gave a brief overview of Alexis de Tocqueville’s background and project of evaluating American Democracy in the early 19 th century. In this new installment, I’d like to share de Tocqueville’s observations about the nature of equality in America and how what he saw might help us understand some of the challenges democracies face today.
Cada mañana, Isabel abría su pequeño taller antes del amanecer, aunque nadie aseguraba que llegaría un cliente. No heredó fortuna, solo poseía una idea: reinventar la forma de vestir a su comunidad. Mientras otros dormían, ella soñaba despierta, hilando futuro entre telas. Así comenzó su historia como emprendedora.
