Economic Tasks

This article deals with economic tasks that any business has to discharge for economic performance and economic results. It attempts to organize these tasks so that executives can perform them systematically, purposefully, with understanding, and with reasonable probability of accomplishment. 

Economic performance is the specific function and contribution of business enterprise, and the reason for its existence. Tasks leads to obtaining economic performance and results and for tasks to yield results need to be thought through and done with direction, method and purpose. 

There are several successful businesses and effective executives - as there are many with at best mediocre results. One searches in vain, however, for an analysis that identifies what successful are doing to give them results. Nowhere is there a description even of the economic tasks that confront a business let alone how one goes about tackling them. To every executives desk come dozens of problems every morning, all clamoring for their attention. But there is little to tell them which are important and which are merely noisy.

That executives give neither sufficient time nor sufficient thought to the future is a universal complaint. Every executive voices it when they talk about their own working day and when they talk or write to their associates. 

It is a valid compliant. Executives should spend more time and thought on the future of their business. They should also spend more time and thought on a good many other things, their social and community responsibilities for instance. Both they and their business pay a stiff penalty for these neglects.  The neglect of the future is only a symptom; the executives slights tomorrow because they cannot get ahead of today. That too is a symptom. The real disease is the absence of  any foundation of knowledge and system for tackling the economic tasks in business. 

Today's job takes all the executive's time, as a rule; yet it is seldom done well. Few managers are greatly impressed with their own performances in the immediate tasks. They feel themselves caught in a 'rat race'. Before an executive can think about tackling the future, they must be able to to dispose of the challenges of today in less time and with greater impact and performance. For this they need a systematic approach to today's job.

There are three different dimensions to the economic tasks, 

1. The present business must be made effective; 

2. Its potential must be identified and realized; 

3. It must be made into a different business for a different future. 

Each task requires a distinct approach. Each asks different questions and each comes out with different conclusions. Yet these are inseparable. All three have to be done at the same time: today. All three have to be carried out with the same organization, the same resources of men, knowledge and money, and in the same entrepreneurial process. The future is not going to be made tomorrow; it is being made today, and largely by the decisions and actions taken with respect to the tasks of today. Conversely, what is being done to bring about the future directly affects the present. The tasks overlap. They require one unified strategy. Otherwise, they cannot really get done at all. 

The next set of articles lays little claim to originality or profundity, but it is to my knowledge an attempt at an organized representation of the economic tasks of the business executives and the first halting step towards a discipline of economic performance in the business enterprise.