I’ve always been a great admirer of the man who invented the term ‘management’ – Peter Drucker. This year would have been his 100th birthday.

Inc Magazine recently published an A-Z of Drucker’s management wisdom, and over the next few weeks I’ll reproduce this A-Z. Some management ‘revision’ never does any harm! So here’s ‘A’!

Abandonment:
Jack Welch gained fame for shedding businesses in which General Electric wasn’t first or second. But it was Drucker who first suggested that choosing what not to do was a decision as strategic as its opposite. Drucker’s theory of “purposeful abandonment” exhorted business leaders to quickly sever projects, policies and processes that had outlived their usefulness. “The first step in a growth policy is not to decide where and how to grow,” he told author Jeffrey Krames in 2003. “It is to decide what to abandon. In order to grow, a business must have a systematic policy to get rid of the outgrown, the obsolete, the unproductive.”

Chanters:
We recently abandoned our radio show on Zambezi Radio 107.7 fm as probably outgrown and unproductive. Were we right or wrong? I’m not sure, we’re currently looking at getting back on radio in some way again in 2010.

We are about to abandon the idea of using a Guest room as an office and build two offices to increase our bedroom letting capacity!

The picture? The radio show!