What Makes an Organization Effective?
For Peter F. Drucker, effectiveness was fundamental. As Drucker wrote in Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices: Organizations exist to accomplish something, and management’s responsibility is to turn purpose into performance and intentions into results.
For more than a decade, the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University has explored what organizational effectiveness looks like in practice—and how it can be understood through evidence. Our work is grounded in a set of principles of organizational effectiveness drawn from Drucker’s ideas about the purpose and responsibilities of management.
These principles provide the foundation for how we think about effective organizations and the questions we ask about their performance. We examine organizational performance across five dimensions: Customer Satisfaction; Employee Satisfaction, Engagement and Development; Innovation; Social Responsibility; and Financial Strength. Together, they provide a way to look beyond any single measure of success and consider the organization as a whole.
Measuring What Matters
Drucker believed organizations should be judged by results, not intentions or activity alone. That idea is at the heart of the Institute’s research into organizational effectiveness. Since 2013, the Drucker Institute has developed a research framework that brings together multiple sources of data to examine the performance of large publicly traded companies.
More than a decade of longitudinal data allows us to explore not only how organizations perform, but how their performance develops and changes over time. The work raises questions that extend beyond any single measure or year: How is effectiveness created and sustained? How do different dimensions of performance relate to one another? How does effectiveness change over time? And what can leaders and researchers learn from the trajectories of organizations?
Company Rankings
Our Company Rankings put this research into practice, providing an annual assessment of the effectiveness of large publicly traded companies. There you can explore company performance, historical data, the measures and data sources behind the rankings, and the methodology we use to assess organizational effectiveness.
Explore the Company Rankings →
Work With Us
The Drucker Institute’s research seeks to understand how organizational effectiveness is created, sustained, and improved. We welcome collaboration with researchers, companies, and other organizations interested in these questions. Researchers may draw on more than a decade of longitudinal data on large publicly traded companies.
To request access to nonpublic data, submit a brief proposal outlining your research question, data needs, methodology, and intended output. We also partner with organizations exploring how the Institute’s research and Drucker’s principles can inform management and leadership practice.