A Year with Peter Drucker: 52 Weeks of Coaching for Leadership Effectiveness

Our thinking, choices, decisions
are determined by
what we’ve SEEN
and the choice of attention area
at a point in time …

And our brain can only see
what it’s prepared to see

Drucker was also a mentor to many notable leaders in business, government, and nonprofits, a role he valued tremendously.

In A Year with Peter Drucker, you will get to experience his mentorship process firsthand as his longtime collaborator Joseph A. Maciariello (no two people) leads you from week to week, lesson to lesson, using previously unpublished material and selected readings from Drucker’s classic works to highlight critical lessons in leadership, personal effectiveness, and mission-driven strategy.

It features examples from the individuals and organizations that Drucker helped to guide to success (Conditions for survival #cfs), including his work assisting leaders in creating some of the world’s most influential religious organizations.

Joseph A. Maciariello has distilled (no two people) the essence of Drucker’s personal mentorship program into an easy-to-follow 52-week course.

Each week contains a lesson, message, or anecdote taken from Drucker’s extensive body of published and unpublished work, moving from theme to theme throughout the year.

It also includes further readings and reflections on the week’s subject, and deep reflection questions—or quick brainstorming prompts—to help readers incorporate the message into their day-to-day work.

The year will cover the themes Drucker (no two people) felt were most important to leadership development, such as

Maciariello, who worked alongside Drucker as a collaborator on a number of his books, delivers the ultimate Drucker companion—and the next best thing to being mentored by the legend himself.

Introduction

Peter Drucker mentored executives and other knowledge workers for over a haIf century through his consulting, teaching, and publications.

As a longtime student and colleague of his, I have had the opportunity to observe his mentoring directly and I have benefited from his counsel.

It began in 1981, when I attended a PhD seminar he taught in Claremont.

I also had the opportunity to learn from him during the twenty-six years I spent as his colleague at what is now the Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management of Claremont Graduate University.

When Drucker reduced his teaching, I had the opportunity to teach the course "Drucker on Management" to executives and MBA students in Claremont and around the world for approximately ten years.

I then coordinated a team-taught course, "The Drucker Difference," involving the entire Drucker faculty.

Finally, I had the extraordinary opportunity to work directly with him during the last six years of his life.

Then in 2008, Bob Buford asked me to assemble, analyze, edit, and study the transcripts and listen to the recordings of Drucker's mentoring of him and a number of other leaders associated with his Leadership Network and the Halftime Institute.

In addition, I later conducted and transcribed interviews related to what I have called the Drucker-Buford Dialogue Project, which took place from 1984 to 2005.

I have devoted much of my time during the past six years to developing the ideas contained in this mentoring book, an opportunity given to me by Bob Buford.

The purpose of this book is to share Drucker's management techniques with fans the world over.

Through a year of readings, lessons, and questions, you will get a chance to experience Drucker's mentorship.

The objective is to share Drucker's mentorship program with you just as he shared it with Buford and with a number of others.

Drucker's work has had a tremendous impact on the management of large-scale organizations, a product of the twentieth century.

Drucker codified the practice of management in 1946 and 1954, largely on the basis of his consulting experience and his knowledge of the social sciences and humanities, including history, political science, psychology, and economics.

Drucker had a number of very unusual qualities.

First, he believed that the discipline of management should be organized by looking at good practice.

He believed that practice organizes reality and therefore good practice should organize the discipline of management.

Second, he was an astute observer of reality, always learning from the people and organizations with whom he associated.

Third, he was able to integrate his vast knowledge and bring it to bear on specific problems faced by executives in their organizations.

Fourth, as a person trained in international law and political science, he looked at organizations from the outside in.

This viewpoint led him to become interested in all of society's organizations — not just for-profit institutions, but also social sector and public sector organizations.

He felt that to tolerate substandard performance in any one sector dissipates wealth and is detrimental to society's overall welfare.

His driving force was to provide for the needs of citizens of free societies so they would never be tempted to turn to authoritarian substitutes, which history, and his own early life experiences, had shown to be disastrous.

THE ALTERNATIVE TO TYRANNY

His domain included private, nonprofit, and governmental organizations and his writings and mentoring were filled with examples from all walks of life.

He did see differences among organizations in these three sectors but he saw many more similarities.

As you read this book and work through the exercises, you will see the value that Drucker saw in taking such a broad perspective.

There are fifty-two entries in the book, one for each week of the year.

They are subdivided into thirteen major topics.

Each topic has important contributions to make in helping you become an effective leader.

Some entries use unexpected examples and applications from organizations that may surprise you, but they are all important to Drucker's worldview, and to his principles of management.

Each entry begins with an introduction and examples introducing the week's lessons and context.

The introduction is then followed by a three-part sequence: readings, reflections, and exercises.

There is a new reading from Drucker on the topic in each entry, generally in part I.

In part Il there are several readings from Drucker along with my reflections, which set the context for the readings.

Finally, part III consists of "practicum-prompts" that help you to apply what you have learned to your own life and work.

Some of the questions are too broad to be handled in the space that follows them; some others are simply reflections entailing no need to write.

My advice is to concentrate first on those entries that have immediate application to your life and duties.

Work these through and try to implement them.

Think through what you expect to happen as a result of your actions and then compare actual results with your expectations.

This process is called feedback analysis.

It should help you to determine what you did right and what still needs improvement.

Some of the entries may also apply to other people in, and other units of, your organization.

You might suggest that relevant people take a look at and work out these entries.

In this way you will make a contribution to the organization as a whole and to other organizations whose mission and welfare you care about.

Throughout the book, you will be introduced to Drucker's principles of management.

These principles are also summarized in "Lessons Learned" and itemized in the Appendix.

Effective leadership is a practice, and like every other practice it is mastered through an iterative process of learning and doing and learning more.

"Lessons Learned" and the Appendix will help you in this iterative process.

My hope is that this book will become an indispensable guide.

That it will lead you deeply into Drucker's knowledge and wisdom, and allow you, as a leader and a person, to convert this wisdom into effective action.

Good luck!

Week 7 Manage in Two Time Dimensions

Introduction

CEOs are acutely aware of the need to balance short-term results with long-term results.

They recognize and take into account the trade-offs.

For example, it is easy to reduce research and development and employee development allowances in times when meeting short-term profit goals is in jeopardy.

But if you do this, make sure you restore the resources and activities as soon as possible to maintain the innovation, knowledge, and skill levels you will need to successfully compete in the future.

Restoring the funds will help to keep your strategic plan intact.

And this is the essence of strategic planning — making resource allocation decisions today that will affect the future.

It requires deliberately allocating people and funds to projects that are directed toward securing the future of your organization.

Yet short-term results are necessary, and this necessity may require you to make trade-offs between short-term and long-term results.

Because executives usually do not have a "bag of gold" to simultaneously spread around to both existing and future products and services, they must calculate what new investments in existing products and services, including people development, will take away from investments in the future prospects of the organization.

If the trade-off is acceptable, then the decision is right.

If not, resource allocation between the present and the future must be rethought until the trade-off is appropriate.

Let's now consider the statement by the CEO in this week's reading.

She is trying to recover past losses before focusing on future products and services: "The basic value, she says, is that first, we have to regain what we have lost in the past, and then build for the future."

Drucker issues a warning about consistency between this short-term action and the longer-term welfare of the organization.

I. Read

There are both short-term and long-term missions [and they] have to be compatible.

But when you look at some modern organizations-for example, here is a very able woman who just took over for Hewlett-Packard.

She wrote a short-term and a long-term mission for Hewlett-Packard when she took over, but the two missions are not compatible.

She knows it by the way.

She is very bright.

The basic value, she says, is that first, we have to regain what we have lost in the past, and then build for the future [italics mine].

By the way, this old consultant said then and often before that it never works.

But that doesn't matter.

But that's everybody's problem [managing in two time dimensions], that's what you need.

You have to have results in the short term and you have to have results in the long term.

The old medical proverb says it doesn't help you much if the old woman, the sick woman, knows the surgery tomorrow would save her life, if she dies during the night.

But it doesn't help you very much either if she survives at night if you don't do the surgery tomorrow and save her life.

So you have to have short-term and longterm missions and the two have to be compatible.

And yet they are often different.

Peter F. Drucker, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1xppECWZPw, February 2, 2009.

II. Reflect

• There are always trade-offs between actions that serve the present and those that further long-term performance.

When making these trade-offs, executives should know the costs imposed on the long term by short-term actions.

• The missions in these two time dimensions may be different but they should be compatible.

1. The Manager's Tasks

"A manager must, so to speak, keep his nose to the grindstone while lifting his eyes to the hills — quite an acrobatic feat."

A manager has two specific tasks.

The first is creation of a true whole that is larger than the sum of its parts, a productive entity that turns out more than the sum of the resources put into it.

The second specific task of the manager is to harmonize in every decision and action the requirements of [the] immediate and long-range future.

A manager cannot sacrifice either without endangering the enterprise.

If a manager does not take care of the next hundred days, there will be no next hundred years.

Whatever the manager does should be sound in expediency as well as in basic longrange objective and principle.

And where he cannot harmonize the two time dimensions, he must at least balance them.

He must calculate the sacrifice he imposes on the long-range future of the enterprise to protect its immediate interests, or the sacrifice he makes today for the sake of tomorrow.

He must limit either sacrifice as much as possible.

And he must repair as soon as possible the damage it inflicts.

He lives and acts in two time dimensions, and is responsible for the performance of the whole enterprise and of his own component in it.

Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, 1973, 1974, chap. 31, pp. 398-99.

• Executives must fix the problems of the past but the real job of the executive is to commit the organization's resources to opportunities in the future.

2. Commit Today's Resources to the Future

Executives, whether they like it or not, are forever bailing out the past.

This is inevitable.

Today is always the result of actions and decisions taken yesterday.

Man, however, whatever his title or rank, cannot foresee the future.

Yesterday's actions and decisions, no matter how courageous or wise they may have been, inevitably become today's problems, crises, and stupidities.

Yet it is the executive's specific job-whether he works in government, in a business, or in any other institution — to commit today's resources to the future.

Peter F. Drucker, The Effective Executive, 1967, pp. 103-4.

• A mission statement must reflect results in the short term as well as results in the long term.

3. A Mission Is Always Long Range

The mission is always long range.

It needs short-range efforts and very often short-range results.

And it starts out with a long-range objective.

There is a wonderful sentence in one of the sermons of the great poet and religious philosopher of the seventeenth century, John Donne.

"Never start with tomorrow to reach eternity.

Eternity is not being reached by small steps."

So we start always with the long range, and then we feed back and say, What do we do today?

Do is the critical word … .

We have had some amazingly successful long-term companies …

They all started out with a very clear long-range concept.

Peter F. Drucker, Managing the Non-Profit Organization: Principles and Practices, 1990, p. 46.

• An executive cannot sacrifice either dimension without threatening the survival of the organization.

III. Practicum-Prompts

Are both short-range and longer-range objectives spelled out in your organization's mission statement?

What are they?

Are the short-term and long-term objectives in your mission statement compatible?

Does your organization focus most of its time and effort on problems related to past decisions?

How can you free up some of your time and resources to focus on opportunities that serve the future of your unit?

“For almost nothing in our educational systems
prepares people
for the reality
in which they will
live, work, and become effective” — Druckerism

A Year with Peter Drucker 52 Weeks of Coaching for Leadership Effectiveness

A Year with Peter Drucker

52 Weeks of Coaching
for Leadership Effectiveness