Spreading Drucker's work

The society of organizations demands of the individual decisions regarding himself.

At first sight, the decision may appear only to concern career and livelihood.

“What shall I do?” is the form in which the question is usually asked.

But actually it reflects a demand that the individual take responsibility for society and its institutions.

“What cause do I want to serve?” is implied.

The World is Full of Options

Carefully choosing your nonprofit affiliations (beware of scams and inside-out bureaucracies because society suffers the consequences and you are part of society.

If they don’t produce the desired results outside of themselves then we have to pay a second or a third or a fourth … organization until we get what is needed.)

And underlying this question is the demand the individual take responsibility for himself.

Managing Oneself then …

The Effective Executive: Preface

“What shall I do with myself?” rather than “’What shall I do?” is really being asked of the young by the multitude of choices around them.

The society of organizations forces the individual to ask of himself:

“Who am I?”

“What do I want to be?”

“What do I want to put into life and what do I want to get out of it?”

read more on how can the individual survive …

The Age of Discontinuity:
Guidelines To Our Changing Society
enhanced by bobembry

 

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... replace the quest for success with the quest for contribution.
(to the society of organizations moving in time — above)

The critical question is not, “How can I achieve?”
but “What can  I  contribute?”

The Daily Drucker

 

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You can’t design your life around a temporary organization

Successful careers are not planned

They develop when people are prepared
for opportunities
because they know
their strengths,
their method of work, and
their values.

Knowing where one belongs
can transform an ordinary person
—hardworking and competent but otherwise mediocre—
into an outstanding performer.

Larger

Managing Oneself and Living in More than One World

To get the benefits you have to calendarize these

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“What do you need to learn to get the most out of your strengths?”

The World is Full of Options

“What do you need to learn so that you can decide where to go next?”

Managing in a Time of Great Change

 

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The three types of intelligence discussed in The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli

Types of behavior that can be observed …

 

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… “Power has to be used.

It is a reality.

If the decent and idealistic toss power in the gutter, the guttersnipes pick it up.

If the able and educated refuse to exercise power responsibly, irresponsible and incompetent people take over the seats of the mighty and the levers of power.

Power not being used for social purposes passes to people who use it for their own ends.

At best it is taken over by the careerists who are led by their own timidity into becoming arbitrary, autocratic, and bureaucratic.”

— How Can The Individual Survive?
The Age of Discontinuity: Guidelines To Our Changing Society
by Peter Drucker

 

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What do you want to be remembered for?

In Landmarks of Tomorrow, Peter Drucker wrote “everyone is an understudy to the leading role in the drama of human destiny” and the “great roles are not written in the iambic pentameter or the Alexandrine of the heroic theater.”

They are, instead, “prosaic — played out in one’s daily life, in one’s work, in one’s citizenship, in one’s compassion or lack of it, in one’s courage to stick on an unpopular principle, and in one’s refusal to sanction man’s inhumanity to man in an age of cruelty and moral numbness.”

Difficulty of infecting (people who really “get it” and will do it openly)

Foundation for future directed decisions

Managing Oneself

The Effective Executive

What do you want to be remembered for?

CEO work area landscapes

How to spread? I'm working on it … Find "Donation" and links near the bottom of this page.

An outline of Drucker book contents

I'm a Peter Drucker enthusiast.

I first encountered Peter while living in Germany. I was in the Air Force and renting an apartment from a Ramstein local. One night while sharing some refreshments with my landlord my tongue got a little too loose and I asked how the Germans could have followed Hitler. Without pause or anger the older gentleman shot right back. We were starving to death. Also while in Germany I had the opportunity to travel around and at one point I visited Dachau, East Berlin (before the wall came down) and Austria. My visits to Dachau and East Germany left lasting impressions — like nothing else. Again in Germany I accidentally read a Fortune magazine review of The Age of Discontinuity. Something the reviewer wrote about Drucker also made a lasting impression. Something about the demystification of history. I wasn't in a mental place where I could do anything with these fragments, but they all made deeply lasting impressions.

Maybe five or six years after the USAF, the CEO of the company where I was working sent every division president — there were ninety of them — a copy of Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices along with a threat. This event made the front cover of Fortune magazine. There is not a shred of evidence that anyone paid any attention to the threat. Shortly thereafter I bought a copy of MTPR. When I read the preface: the alternative to tyranny, I made the connection to my experiences in Germany and I became a devout Drucker admirer.

Still not in a mental place for knowing what to do with this, it slipped off my radar.

A few years further down the road I became the general manager of discontinued operations for the corporation. During that time I started actively reading Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices. In parallel I started thinking about what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.

When I finished cleaning up the ill-considered corporate acquisitions, the corporation was finished with me — 1981. They were absolutely sure that I had removed all the bad apples and that it was going to be smooth sailing ahead. It didn't turn out that way because the remaining divisions had no management either. The fact that so many of these divisions had no management and had failed left me with the desire and commitment to travel a different road.

I never went looking for a job. I started reading everything I could get my hands on — from "thought leaders," stock-pickers, magazine/news columnists, Forbes statistics and company stories. During this time Peter continued his thinking and writing.

All of the experiences above are just blind luck that stem from the Vietnam war. Without it there would have been different events in my life and I may never have heard of Drucker or understood his importance. There are major implications here, but I've already written too much history.

About ten+ years ago the Internet entered my radar and I started working on a prototype web site while I continued reading and concept harvesting. The website is based on my grasp of Drucker's mental landscape and the situations I've observed. The overall concept of the website tries to connect initial exposure, conceptual resources (Drucker's and a few others), implementation of these, individual life phases and stories, organization life phases and stories, a changing world, a few connecting concepts and lots of cross-linking. The concept of the site is the opposite of floating along on the assumptions that what's already being done is adequate to the challenges ahead, nothing new needs doing or the right things to do are already on our mental radar. It is the opposite of inside out, product/service driven …

Peter Drucker: Conceptual Resources

The Über Mentor

A political / social ecologist
a different way of seeing and thinking about
the big picture
— lead to his top-of-the-food-chain reputation

about Management (a shock to the system)

 

Why Peter Drucker Distrusted Facts (HBR blog)

 

“I am not a ‘theoretician’; through my consulting practice I am in daily touch with the concrete opportunities and problems of a fairly large number of institutions, foremost among them businesses but also hospitals, government agencies and public-service institutions such as museums and universities.

And I am working with such institutions on several continents: North America, including Canada and Mexico; Latin America; Europe; Japan and South East Asia.” — PFD

 

 

List of his books

 

Large combined outline of Drucker’s books — useful for topic searching.

 

 

“High tech is living in the nineteenth century,
the pre-management world.
They believe that people pay for technology.
They have a romance with technology.
But people don't pay for technology:
they pay for what they get out of technology.” —
The Frontiers of Management

Keywords: tlnkwdruckerswork

“The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not turbulence; it is to act with yesterday’s logic”. — Peter Drucker

The shift from manual workers who do as they are being told — either by the task or by the boss — to knowledge workers who have to manage themselves ↓ profoundly challenges social structure …

“Managing Oneself is a REVOLUTION in human affairs.” … “It also requires an almost 180-degree change in the knowledge workers’ thoughts and actions from what most of us—even of the younger generation—still take for granted as the way to think and the way to act.” …

… “Managing Oneself is based on the very opposite realities: Workers are likely to outlive organizations (and therefore, employers can’t be depended on for designing your life), and the knowledge worker has mobility.” ← in a context

These pages are attention directing tools for navigating a world moving toward unimagined futures.

It’s up to you to figure out what to harvest and calendarize
— working something out in time (1915, 1940, 1970 … 2040 … the outer limit of your concern) — nobody is going to do it for you.

It may be a step forward to actively reject something (rather than just passively ignoring) and then figure out a coping plan for what you’ve rejected.

Your future is between your ears and our future is between our collective ears — it can’t be otherwise. A site exploration starting point

What needs doing?

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