about Peter F. Drucker ↓
Ecological awareness — preparation to “SEE” ↓
Most mistakes in thinking ↓
Sixteen different angles
Peter Drucker — The Über Mentor
Freedom
Power is a reality
Thinking, choices, decisions
are determined by
what’s been
“SEEN … ”
… and the choice of attention area …
… at a point in time
Social Needs and Business Opportunities
Thinking Broad and
Thinking Detailed #tbtd
“Once perception
is directed in a certain direction
it cannot help but see,
and once something is seen,
it cannot be unseen”
↑ Perception provides
the ingredients
for thinking Image thinking
#lms #ams
The brain can only see
what it
is prepared to see
«§§§»
“For almost nothing
in our educational systems
prepares people
for the reality
in which they will
live,
work,
and become effective” —
Druckerism
Management Challenges for the 21st Century ::: Managing in the Next Society
Organizations — not what you might imagine #org
The Spirit of “Organization” Performance — pdf
Pieces of the puzzle → In real life
most situations
are open-ended …
You have to
find the pieces and
assess the value of the pieces
and then select the pieces. ↓
«§§§»
Most mistakes in thinking
are mistakes in perception … ↓
Seeing only part of the situation;
Jumping to conclusions;
Misinterpretation caused by feelings
«§§§»
To know something,
to really understand
something important,
one must look at it
from sixteen different angles. #sda
People are perceptually slow,
and there is no shortcut
to understanding;
it takes a great deal of time. continue
«§§§»
Being prepared for what comes next — and there’s no one to ask
“Only Connect”
was the constant admonition
of a great English novelist,
E.M. Forster
#dwrau ::: Carry on or Connect up
#woo Windows of Opportunity
James Burke
Attempting to construct an evolving life from puzzle pieces
Work has to make a life ← Serious Outside Interest
#lms #ams
finding and selecting the pieces of the puzzle #fastp
Basic thinking processes
Broad/specific :::
Projection
Attention directing :::
Recognition :::
Movement
#Note the number of books about Drucker
Why would a person take time our of their life
to write about Drucker? ↓
My life as a knowledge worker
Drucker: a political
or social ecologist ↑ ↓
“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.
Still, a consultant is at one remove
from the day-today practice —
that is both his strength
and his weakness.
And so my viewpoint
tends more to be that of an outsider.”
Broad worldview ↑ ↓
«§§§»
Most mistakes in thinking ↑ are mistakes in PERCEPTION:
Seeing only part of the situation (Drucker below) ;
Jumping to conclusions;
Misinterpretation caused by feelings …
«§§§»
Drucker: a political
or social ecologist ↑ ↓
Drucker on professional writing, economics,
business schools, philosophy, religion, political science,
Japanese Art, accountants, and academia
Thinking Broad and Thinking Detailed #tbtd
#pdw larger ↑ ::: Books by Peter Drucker ::: Rick Warren + Drucker
Books by Bob Buford and Walter Wriston
Global Peter Drucker Forum ::: Charles Handy — Starting small fires
Post-capitalist executive ↑ T. George Harris
Books by Edward de Bono
YouTube: A brief celebration of Edward de Bono's
ideas on thinking → IMAGE THINKING
The telephone game → ← No two people
Your thinking, choices, decisions
are determined by
what you’ve “SEEN”
the choice of attention area …
… at a point in time
“Once perception is directed
in a certain direction
it cannot help but see,
and once something is seen,
it cannot be unseen”
View of the economy
Realities —
Business realities, Market realities,
Knowledge realities, and Executive realities
The speed of product and technology adoption
Realities associated with the pursuit of the bright ideas
and dealing with risks and uncertainties #dwrau
↑ “And it ought to be remembered
that there is nothing more difficult
to take in hand,
more perilous to conduct,
or more uncertain in its success,
then to take the lead
in the introduction
of a new order of things.”
Niccolò Machiavelli: The Prince #pman
And yet tomorrow always arrives
and it is always different
Work has to make a life
If you don’t design your own life
someone else will do it for you
#lms #ams
Someones ↓
No two people ever read the same book
The telephone game
operacy — the skills of doing ↑
Work has to make a life ← Serious Outside Interest
Thinking About Information
TEC - PISCO (image ::: PDF ::: Deliberate thinking)
The Six Thinking Hats ::: White ::: Yellow ::: Green
TO-LO-PO-SO-GO
The tool method ↑ ↓
Information is energy
for mental tasks
↓ ↑
How is it possible to
work toward horizonS
that aren’t on your radar
at the right pointS in time ↓
↑ ↓
The Drucker Lectures:
Essential Lessons on
Management, Society, and Economy
↓
Do You Know Where You Belong? (1992)
From Teaching to Learning. (1999)
On Globalization (2001)
↓
The Definitive Drucker:
Challenges For
Tomorrow's Executives
Richard Haass #worldview ↓
The World: A Brief Introduction Amazon ::: Preface #pdf
Wikipedia: Human History
Wikipedia: Timeline of human evolution
The Roosevelts
“More detailed map” ↑
About technology
A Year with Peter Drucker:
52 Weeks of Coaching
for Leadership Effectiveness
The Five Most Important Questions
You Will Ever Ask
About Your Nonprofit Organization
Danger of too much planning
Learning to Learn
↑ ecological awareness → operacy —
the skills of doing
The memo “THEY” don’t want you to SEE
“The world around
is full of a huge number of things
to which one could pay attention.
But it would be impossible
to react to everything at once.
So one reacts only to
a selected part of it.
The choice of attention area
determines
the action or thinking
that follows.
The choice
of this area of attention
is one of the most fundamental aspects
of thinking.” — Edward de Bono
#lms #ams
Work has to make a LIFE
“You have to produce results
in the short term.
But you also have to
produce results in the long term.
And the long term(e.g., sound transportation ) is not simply
the adding up of short terms.” — Druckerism
YouTube: A brief celebration of Edward de Bono's
ideas on thinking → IMAGE THINKING
If you never change your mind,
why have one?
«§§§»
The text below
contains
alternative
areas of attention
All the pieces in this book—two interviews, one at the beginning and one at the end, and twenty-five chapters in between—have one common theme, despite their apparent diversity.
They all deal with changes that have already irreversibly happened.
They therefore deal with changes on which executives can—indeed must—take action.
None of the pieces in this book attempts to predict the future.
All deal with what executives can do—have to do—to make the future.
It is not so very difficult to predict the future.
It is only pointless.
Many futurologists have high batting averages—the way they measure themselves and are commonly measured.
They do a good job foretelling some things.
But always far more important are the fundamental changes that happened though no one predicted them or could possibly have predicted them.
Looking back ten years today, no one in 1985 predicted—or could have predicted—that the establishment of the European Economic Community would not release explosive economic growth in Europe but would, on the contrary, usher in a decade of economic stagnation and petty bickering.
As a result, the Unified Europe of 1995 is actually weaker in the world economy than was the fractured Europe of 1985; No one, ten years ago, predicted—or could have predicted—the explosive economic growth of mainland China, a growth that came despite rather than because of its government policies.
No one predicted the emergence of the 55 million overseas Chinese as the new economic superpower.
No one ten years ago could have predicted that the biggest impact of the Information Revolution on business would be a radical rethinking and restructuring of the oldest information system—and one that apparently was ossified in every joint and tissue—the accounting model of the “bean counters.”
But equally important: one cannot make decisions for the future.
Decisions are commitments to action.
And actions are always in the present, and in the present only.
But actions in the present are also the one and only way to make the future.
Executives are paid to execute—that is, to take effective action.
That they can only do in contemplation of the present, and by exploiting the changes that have already happened.
This book starts out with the executive’s job, that is, with management.
What has already happened in the world of executives that puts into question—or perhaps even makes obsolete—the assumptions, rules, and practices that worked these last forty years and that therefore have been automatically taken for granted.
The book then proceeds to look at the implications of one particular fundamental change in management, economy, and society: the emergence of information as the executive’s key resource and as the organization’s skeleton.
The premise of this part of the book is the old adage that either you are the tool’s master or you are its servant.
What do executives have to learn to be masters of the new tool?
Then this book moves out of the executive’s job and organizations and moves into markets and into a world economy in which there are new power centers, new growth markets, new growth industries.
In its last section the book analyzes the changes in society and government—the biggest changes, perhaps, in this Century of Social Transformations, in which government has been both a great success and the ultimate failure.
Only thirty—perhaps even only twenty—years ago it was often said that while there were a great many more managers and executives than there had been in the twenties (let alone before the First World War), most of them were doing pretty much what their predecessors had done and in pretty much the same way.
No one would say that anymore for today’s managers and executives.
But if there is one thing that is certain today it is that tomorrow’s managers and executives will do things that are even more different from what today’s managers and executives do.
And they will do them even more differently.
To enable today’s executives to be ahead of this different tomorrow—indeed to make it their tomorrow—is the aim of this book.
—Peter F. Drucker
Claremont, California
May 1995
America needs a new social priority: to triple the productivity of the nonprofits and to double the share of gross personal income—now just below 3 percent—they collect as donations.
Otherwise the country faces, only a few years out, social polarization.
Federal, state, and local governments will have to retrench sharply, no matter who is in office.
Moreover, government has proved incompetent at solving social problems.
Virtually every success we have scored has been achieved by nonprofits.
The great advances in health and longevity have been sponsored, directed, and in large part financed by such nonprofits as the American Heart Association and the American Mental Health Association.
Whatever results there are in the rehabilitation of addicts we owe to such nonprofits as Alcoholics Anonymous, the Salvation Army, and the Samaritans.
The schools in which inner-city minority children learn the most are parochial schools and those sponsored by some Urban League chapters.
The first group to provide food and shelter to the Kurds fleeing from Saddam last spring was an American nonprofit, the International Rescue Committee.
Many of the most heartening successes are being scored by small, local organizations.
One example would be the tiny Judson Center in Royal Oak, Michigan—an industrial suburb of Detroit—gets black women and their families off welfare while simultaneously getting severely handicapped children out of institutions and back into society.
Judson trains carefully picked welfare mothers to raise in their homes, for a modest salary, two or three crippled or emotionally disturbed kids.
The rehabilitation rate for the welfare mothers is close to 100 percent, with many of them in five years or so moving into employment as rehabilitation workers.
The rehabilitation rate for the children, who otherwise would be condemned to lifetime institutional confinement, is about 50 percent; and every one of these kids had been given up on as hopeless.
The nonprofits spend far less for results than governments spend for failures.
The cost per pupil in the New York Archdiocese’s parochial schools—70 percent of whose students stay in school, stay off the streets, and graduate with high literacy and salable-skills—is about half that in New York City’s failing public schools.
Two-thirds of the first-offenders paroled in Florida into the custody of the Salvation Army are “permanently” rehabilitated—they are not indicted for another crime for at least six years.
Were they to go to prison, two-thirds would become habitual criminals.
Yet a prisoner costs at least twice as much per year as a parolee in the custody of the Salvation Army.
The Judson Center saves the state of Michigan $100,000 a year for each welfare mother and her charges—one-third in welfare costs and two-thirds in the costs of keeping the children in institutions.
Though the majority of the students in private colleges and universities get some sort of financial aid, their parents still pay more than do the parents of students in state universities and colleges.
But the state-university student’s education actually costs a good deal more than (in some states twice as much as) that of the student in a private nonprofit institution—with the difference paid by the taxpayer.
The nonprofits have the potential to become America’s social sector-equal in importance to the public sector of government and the private sector of business.
The delivery system is already in place: There are now some 900,000 nonprofits, the great majority close to the problems of their communities.
And about 30,000 of them came into being in 1990 (the latest year for which figures are available)—practically all dedicated to local action on one problem: tutoring minority children; furnishing ombudsmen for patients in the local hospital; helping immigrants through government red tape.
Where twenty years ago the American middle class thought it had done its social duty by writing a check, it increasingly commits itself to active doing as well.
According to the best available statistics, there are now some 90 million Americans—one out of every two adults—working as “volunteers” in nonprofits for three hours a week on average; the nonprofits have become America’s largest “employer.”
Increasingly these volunteers do not look upon their work as charity; they see it as a parallel career to their paid jobs and insist on being trained, on being held accountable for results and performance, and on career opportunities for advancement to professional and managerial—though still unpaid—positions in the nonprofit.
Above all, they see in volunteer work access to achievement, to effectiveness, to self-fulfillment, indeed to meaningful citizenship.
And for this reason there is more demand for well-structured volunteer jobs than there are positions to fill.
Some observers (such as Brian O’Connell, head of Independent Sector, the national association of the large nonprofits) believe that, within ten years, two-thirds of American adults—120 million—will want to work as nonprofit volunteers for five hours a week each, which would mean a doubling of the man- and womanpower available for nonprofit work.
And the nonprofits are becoming highly innovative.
When some friends and I founded the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for NonProfit Management a year ago, we planned as our first public event a $25,000 award for the best innovation that would “create a significant new dimension of nonprofit performance.”
We hoped to receive 40 applications.
We received 809—and most were deserving of a prize.
The actual award went to the Judson Center, but the big nonprofits are as innovative as the small fry in many cases.
With several billion dollars in revenue, Family Service America—headquartered in Milwaukee—has become bigger than a good many Fortune 500 companies; it now is probably the biggest American nonprofit next to the Red Cross.
It has achieved its phenomenal growth in part through contracting with large employers such as General Motors to help employee families with such problems as addiction or the emotional disorders of adolescent children.
For the nonprofits’ potential to become reality, three things are needed.
First, the average nonprofit must manage itself as well as the best-managed ones do.
The majority still believe that good intentions and a pure heart are all that are needed.
They do not yet see themselves as accountable for performance and results.
And far too many splinter their efforts or waste them on nonproblems and on activities that would be done better—and more cheaply—by a business.
Second, nonprofits have to learn how to raise money.
The American public has not become less generous—there is little evidence of the “compassion fatigue” nonprofit people talk about.
In fact, giving has been going up quite sharply these past few years—from 2.5 percent of personal income to 2.9 percent.
Unfortunately, a great many nonprofits still believe that the way to get money is to hawk needs.
But the American public gives for results.
It no longer gives to “charity”; it “buys in.”
Of the charitable appeals most of us get in the mail every week, usually just one talks of results—the one that gets our check.
The nonprofits will have to get the additional money they need primarily from individuals—as they always have.
Even if there is government money—mainly via vouchers, I expect—and money from companies, they can supply only a fraction of what is needed.
Finally, we need a change in the attitude of government and government bureaucracies.
President Bush has spoken glowingly of the importance of the nonprofits as the “thousand points of light.”
If he really believes this, he should propose allowing taxpayers to deduct $1.10 for each dollar they give to nonprofits as a cash donation.
This would solve the nonprofits’ money problems at once.
It also could cut government deficits in the not-so-very-long run-for a well-managed nonprofit gets at least twice the bang out of each buck that a government agency does.
Some of the voucher programs already enacted cut public school budgets, since some of the district’s per-pupil spending moves with the child into the private sector.
Instead of such a policy, however, we have the IRS making one move after the other to penalize and to curtail donations to nonprofits—and the tax collectors of the big states are all doing the same.
Each of these moves is presented as “closing a tax loophole”; in fact, none has yielded a penny of additional revenue and none is likely to do so.
The real motivation for such actions is the bureaucracy’s hostility to the nonprofits—not too different from the bureaucracy’s hostility to markets and private enterprise in the former Communist countries.
The success of the nonprofits undermines the bureaucracy’s power and denies its ideology.
Worse, the bureaucracy cannot admit that the nonprofits succeed where governments fail.
What is needed, therefore, is a public policy that establishes the nonprofits as the country’s first line of attack on its social problems.
In my 1969 book The Age of Discontinuity, I first proposed “privatization,” only to have every reviewer tell me that it would never happen.
Now, of course, privatization is widely seen as the cure for modern economies mismanaged by socialist bureaucracies.
We now need to learn that “nonprofitization” may for modern societies he the way out of mismanagement by welfare bureaucracies.
[1991]
