Community: The Concept of the Corporation Chapter 3

A student of mine, who has been my regular discussant on the community nature of business, has just returned to his home to take charge of an educational institution. He participated in the group as a high school student and is looking forward to leading it. It gave him, and a large group of other students, a new perspective of themselves. It is clear that as a leader, he hopes to expand that role.

He’s going to an organization that is in pretty good shape. No debts. No major problems. He needs to update the group’s technology but that is a fairly trivial issue. Yet, he’s going into it with hope, with a desire to do something new, to do the kinds of things that were one important to him.

Public Relations: The Concept of the Corporation Chapter 2

This is an interesting little section but a little sad. Here, public relations refers to corporate relations with the public, a two-way flow of information, not merely publicity for the company. Drucker seems to think that companies can put together boards that will facilitate that flow. General Motors is trying to do something in Dayton that will involve all local industry.

I know that there are indeed community roundtables and business discussion groups. Information does flow through these methods. But so often, it is really nothing more than opinion surveys and corporate messages. Abstraction upon abstraction with a dose of alienation. Not an easy problem to solve. Not an issue for which Drucker gives a lot of ideas. It is not merely board reform, he notes, because boards of directors are not representational. Members are supposed to think about the good of the organization not the good of the segment that support them. If such is the case, then community relations are clearly an operational activity.