Peter Drucker cast a light so bright that you can’t help but follow him. Peter Drucker teaches us about business and illuminates the future.
Peter Drucker teaches us.
Drucker may have been the 20th Century’s most influential business thinker. Though he wrote 39 books, most of what I know about just a few of those books.
Here are some of his most memorable insights.
Peter Drucker teaches us to give employees a chance to grow
During the 20 years, I was building the company; we didn’t lose a single one of the eight people on our senior leadership team. The same was true of nearly all of our top performers.
We compensated people fairly, but that’s not why they stayed. Drucker taught me that what drives the best people is a challenge that allows them to reach beyond themselves to be part of something greater.
It’s what Peter called a “moon shot,” a goal so large it creates a gravity to draw people to it and keep them in its orbit.
Besides, challenging only scares off the people that you need to scare off.
Peter Drucker teaches us … pay attention to non-customers
When Burger King sees its business decline after focusing almost exclusively on young male customers, you can practically hear Drucker telling executives at the fast-food chain that they’ve forgotten to pay attention to another essential group: their “noncustomers.”
“Even the biggest enterprise (other than a government monopoly) has many more noncustomers than it has customers,” Drucker wrote, noting that hardly any companies supply even 30 percent of a given market.
“And yet very few institutions know anything about the noncustomers—very few of them even know that they exist, let alone know who they are. And even fewer know why they are not customers.”
Ask why it’s being done
Drucker had an issue with using Industrial Era metrics for the Knowledge Age. He felt that all too often we streamline tasks without first asking why the task is being done, beginning with.
One of the simplest yet most profound lessons I learned from Drucker was always to question the task’s reason for existence before fixing it; does it add value, and if so, how? Drucker was a master at asking questions.
In the time I studied him I’m not sure he ever actually answered a single question of mine directly.
Instead, he would almost always rephrase or reframe my questions. Challenging conventional wisdom was his forte — he often called himself an “insultant,” who scolded people for a fee.
It taught me never to be afraid or ashamed to say, “I don’t know,” and to ask “why?” until I did.
Peter Drucker teaches us … balance long and short-term
When executives at Lehman Brothers become preoccupied with the daily stock price and consumed with quarterly earnings targets at the expense of being good stewards of the business, you can imagine Drucker shaking his head in disappointment.
“The most critical management job is to balance short-term and long-term,” Drucker said, adding that a “one-sided emphasis” on the former is “deleterious and dangerous.”
Ultimately, he added, deciding “whether a business should be run for short-term results or with a focus on the long-term is . . . A question of values. Financial analysts believe that businesses can be run for both simultaneously. Successful businesspeople know better.”
Your fault if its boring
Drucker didn’t tolerate laziness. He was constantly in motion. I once asked if he felt he shouldn’t slow down at some point — this was when he was about 90.
He responded that hard work was bad only for those people who didn’t have purpose or passion. If you have a reason to work hard and a passion for what you do, then there will never be enough hours in the day.
But Drucker also balanced work with great passions in other areas of his life: his teaching, his love of Japanese art, and his willingness to mentor and pay it forward.
Peter Drucker teaches us to set the correct priorities
Effective executives concentrate on superior performance where superior performance will produce outstanding results. They force themselves to set priorities and remain committed to their priority decisions.
They know they have no choice but to do first things first — and secondthingsnot at all. The alternative is to get nothing done.
Remember this, making things happen is not the same as getting things done. It all deals with priorities.
Peter Drucker teaches us … lead, don’t just manage
Drucker had a problem with the concept of managing knowledge workers. He felt that leadership was increasingly becoming a shared responsibility.
He believed in pushing down decision-making to those closest to the process. To lead, in Drucker’s mind, was to empower people by providing the resources for success rather than a roadmap with turn-by-turn directions.
If that frightens you, he said, then you have the wrong people leading your organization.
Teaming
And when Wal-Mart teams up with American Public University so that the retailer’s employees can receive course credit—equivalent to as much as 45 percent of what it takes to earn a college degree—for corporate training and “on-the-job learning,” you can bet that Drucker would have been fascinated by the potential to combine thinking and doing this way.
“The intellectual’s world, unless counterbalanced by the manager, becomes one in which everybody ‘does his own thing’ but nobody achieves anything,” Drucker wrote. “The manager’s world, unless counterbalanced by the intellectual, becomes the stultifying bureaucracy of the ‘Organization Man.’ But if the two balance each other, there can be creativity and order, fulfillment and mission.”
Peter Drucker teaches us to treat your employees as volunteers
This is one of those perspectives that is completely unintuitive when you first hear it. Drucker spent the last part of his career working a great deal with nonprofits and volunteer organizations.
He wanted to bring business acumen to nonprofits, but he also believed that for-profit organizations could learn a lot from how non-profits attracted volunteers. “Volunteers,” he would say, “leave at the end of the day and only come back if they want to.”
When you think about the work ethos among Millenials and Gen Z, who need a deep sense of social purpose in their work, it’s obvious that Drucker was ahead of his time.
Forget the past
How do you manage the accelerating pace of change? You do it by “organized abandonment” — consciously killing off yesterday. Drucker chose his words carefully.
One of my favorite quotes of his is that “the hardest thing to do is to keep a corpse from rotting.” Yeah, not a pleasant thought, but how often do companies hold onto the past with their best and brightest while the future passes them by?
Not a bad lesson in business and life.
Peter Drucker teaches us to be humble
This one is how I’ll best remember Peter Drucker. If anyone had a reason to be boastful and arrogant, it was Drucker. He had been on the front lines of more change than a hundred men, and women could see in a lifetime.
He was anything but arrogant. Drucker had no reason to mentor me and offer his time, but he did.
How to be the successful businessman
Managingtime
Effective executives know where their time goes. They work systematically at managing the small portion of their time that can be brought under their control.
Drucker’s belief on managing time was simple; if you can’t manage time, you won’t be able to manage anything. It all starts with managing your time.
Focusing on contribution
Effective executives focus on outward contributions. They gear their efforts to results rather than work.
They begin with the question, “What results are expected of me?” rather than with the work to be done, let alone with its techniques and tools. Do you clearly understand what is expected of you?
Identifyingandbuilding on strengths
Effective executives build on strengths — their own and the strengths of their superiors, colleagues, and subordinates. They also build on the strengths of the situation — on what theycando. They do not build on weaknesses.
They do not start with things they cannot do. They try and make their weaknesses and what they cannot do irrelevant. Contrary to what many coaches try to have you work on, yes?
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Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.
