Nobody had the clout Peter Drucker enjoyed in management circles. He dominated management thinking in his 70-year consulting career and in his 39 books – one of which is yet to be published. Drucker died in November, days shy of his 96th birthday.
It’s no surprise that Drucker was such a wise student of human psychology. He actually met Sigmund Freud in Vienna before leaving central Europe. What caused Drucker to pull up stakes? He saw Hitler’s handwriting on the wall.
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After Drucker had earned a doctorate in Frankfurt, Germany, he moved to London in 1933 and finally settled in the United States in 1937. As both a teacher and a consultant, he groomed generations of leaders and managers. Respected as he was here, Drucker was nearly worshipped in Japan.
The guru may be gone, but his wisdom will be challenging and training minds for a long time to come:
*Focus: What are you in business for? Is it to rake in huge profits? Is it to earn a fat bonus? “The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer,” Drucker preached. Keep your eye on that ball, and all other good things will happen.
*Listening: Most management experts stress how to get your message across. Drucker focused on the manager’s role as a careful listener. He was fond of saying, “The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said.”
*Leadership: “Leadership is not magnetic personality – that can just as well be a glib tongue,” Drucker contended. “It is not ‘making friends and influencing people’ – that is flattery. Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to higher sights.”
And all leaders don’t come from a single mold. “Some of the best business and nonprofit CEOs I’ve worked with,” Drucker noted, “were not stereotypical leaders. They were all over the map in terms of their personalities, attitudes, values, strengths and weaknesses.”
*Efficiency: “Efficiency is doing better what is already being done,” Drucker contended. But, first make sure what you are doing already is worth doing at all.
Before you reorganize a department, ask if you really need it in the first place.
Shopping for a pricey new machine? Will the product line it makes really deliver a product that matters? According to Drucker: “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”
*Conviction: Drucker didn’t just write about businesses. He also consulted with nonprofit organizations. The Girl Scouts, the American Heart Association and the Red Cross were among them.
Drucker saw a spark in the dedication many have for nonprofit outfits. In “Managing for the Future” (Plume, 1993), he talked about a woman who left a senior officer position at a bank to take a job at the Nature Conservancy. What makes a professional person trade T-bills for duckbills? Clarity of mission.
“I know what I’m here for,” she explained. If you want real motivation in business, people need to feel just that way, too.
*Decision making: It’s assumed “that only senior executives make decisions or that only senior executives’ decisions matter,” Drucker believed. “This is a dangerous mistake.”
You can’t just give lip service to delegation. What happens to companies where decision making keeps bobbing to the top? It’s a sure formula for a business going belly up.
Managers misunderstand their job as often as anyone else. Why? The need to feel important and to interfere is irresistible. “So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work,” Drucker said.
*Innovation: “The best way to predict the future is to create it,” Drucker asserted.
In his classic text “Management” (Harper & Row, 1974), Drucker described Thomas Edison as “the most productive inventor of the 19th century. … He always started out with a clear definition of the product desired.” People often think of Edison as an inspired inventor. But he was also systematic. That’s why, Drucker observes, “the large number of his assistants … became successful inventors in their own right.”
An idol of mine for half a century, Drucker kept adding new twists to his theories well into his 90s. And he always scaled daring challenges. An avid mountain climber into his 80s, it was, well, just part of his nature.
Mackay’s Moral: The guru whose teachings you plant in your head is one who’s never really dead.
Harvey Mackay is author of The New York Times best seller “Pushing the Envelope.” He can be reached through his Web site: www.mackay.com; or Mackay Envelope Corp., 2100 Elm St., Minneapolis, MN 55414.
