In researching additional materials for a book I am writing, I keep coming back to Peter Drucker, who didn’t differentiate ANY kind of management- Essentially, Drucker (despite misleading titles written by people other than he) did not even view GENERAL management as a profession, but (correctly so, IMPO) as a process or methodology.

Another early researcher on the topic, French mining engineer Henry Fayol, essentially defined much of what we now know as project management, however, like Drucker, Fayol too did it in the context of GENERAL, not project management.

Bottom line on all this, I think at least a few of the professional organizations purporting or pretending to represent the “voice of the practitioner”, have tried to make something out of nothing. After all, when you take project management, and add in portfolio and program management, haven’t we come full circle to general management again?

BR,
Dr. PDG, back in Jakarta