“What then is managing the business? It follows from the analysis of business activity as the creation of a customer through marketing and innovation that managing a business must always be entrepreneurial in character. There is need for administrative performance. But it follows the entrepreneurial objectives. Structure follows strategy.

It also follows that managing a business must be a creative rather than a adaptive task. The more a management creates economic conditions or changes them rather than passively adapts to them, the more it manages the business.

But an analysis of the nature of a business also shows that management, while ultimately tested by performance alone, is a rational activity. Concretely this means that a business must set objectives that express what is desirable of attainment rather than (as the maximization-of-profit theorem implies) aim at accommodation to the possible. Once objectives have been set by fixing one’s sights on the desirable, the question can be raised what concessions to the possible have to be made. This requires management to decide what business the enterprise is engaged in, and what business it should be engaged in.”

All the above are marketing functions (or activities, if you prefer). I particularly like the Drucker line, “a business must set objectives that express what is desirable of attainment rather than (as the maximization-of-profit theorem implies) aim at accommodation to the possible.” And that is the role for marketing. Everything else — finance, operations, etc. — is the “accommodation to the possible.”

- Freddy

“What then is managing the business? It follows from the analysis of business activity as the creation of a customer through marketing and innovation that managing a business must always be entrepreneurial in character. There is need for administrative performance. But it follows the entrepreneurial objectives. Structure follows strategy.

It also follows that managing a business must be a creative rather than a adaptive task. The more a management creates economic conditions or changes them rather than passively adapts to them, the more it manages the business.

But an analysis of the nature of a business also shows that management, while ultimately tested by performance alone, is a rational activity. Concretely this means that a business must set objectives that express what is desirable of attainment rather than (as the maximization-of-profit theorem implies) aim at accommodation to the possible. Once objectives have been set by fixing one’s sights on the desirable, the question can be raised what concessions to the possible have to be made. This requires management to decide what business the enterprise is engaged in, and what business it should be engaged in.”

All the above are marketing functions (or activities, if you prefer). I particularly like the Drucker line, “a business must set objectives that express what is desirable of attainment rather than (as the maximization-of-profit theorem implies) aim at accommodation to the possible.” And that is the role for marketing. Everything else — finance, operations, etc. — is the “accommodation to the possible.”

- Freddy