800-CEO-READ Blog

Great Ideas - Part I

A couple months ago, I saw a review in the Wall Street Journal about a new series that Penguin has put out. I would intrigued because they were small paperbacks of classic works. I got a set of the books in and I think they are marvelous (and have ever seen me use the word marvelous?).

There are 12 books in the series:

• The Christians and The Fall of Rome by Edward Gibbon
• Common Sense by Thomas Paine
• The Inner Life by Thomas à Kempis
• Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
• On Art and Life by John Ruskin
• On Friendship by Michel de Montaigne
• On Natural Selection by Charles Darwin
• On the Pleasure of Hating by William Hazlitt
• On the Shortness of Life by Lucius Annaeus Seneca
• The Prince by Niccolo Macchiavelli
• Why I Am So Wise by Friedrich Nietzsche
• Why I Write by George Orwell

This series is one Penguin US imported from their counterparts in the UK. Tomorrow, I am going to post a Q&A with Simon Winder, the UK editor that ushered these to bookshelves.

Quote of the day and a little more.

Like many, I get the Fast Company blog updates in my Inbox. One entry (I admit that in the blogosphere, it's slightly outdated having been posted on November 7) has stuck in my mind and in my Inbox for the last few weeks.

It starts with a quote from Tom Peters:

If you're not confused, you're not paying attention.

It's interesting because ambiguity is a necessary part of life. A part of life that has led to a man walking on the moon, the personal computer, the latest flu vaccine and much more. I know we (as human beings) would not have come quite as far without the ambiguity which has birthed questions that have led to creation. The FC blog entry further explains the idea that confusion is not necessarily a bad thing.

Other treats for today:

Jackie Huba and Ben McConnell, authors of Creating Customer Evangelists are giving away themselves (literally) for the day. Enter now at inBubbleWrap.

Also this week, we are posting a few excerpts from Married to the Brand on why customers become passionate about certain brands.

Enjoy.

Next For Friedman

Publisher's Weekly interviewed Thomas Friedman for their Three Anwers Feature on the heels of him winning the Goldman Sachs/FT Business Book of the Year Award. For fans of The World is Flat, here is question three and the answer:

PW: What's your next project?

TF: I'm going on leave for a month and working on the updated and expanded version of The World Is Flat, which will be out in paperback and probably also a [new] hardback edition this spring. To show how far we've come since the first edition, at the beginning of November the podcast version of this book was the #1 selling album on Apple iTunes. When I started this book in March 2004 podcasting didn't even exist.

Fast Company continues to support books

Fast Company since its inception has supported new business thought. You can look at the profiles of people like Watts Wacker and George Stalk. You can point back to the classic covers of The Brand Called You and Free Agent Nation.

I am happy to see that commitment continue with the new leadership and ownership at the magazine. The November issue has three (count them THREE) piece by Lucas Conley, their new book reviewer. He starts with a piece called Year of the Economist, where he talks all the hub-bub about the dismal science. He then write a feature article on our friends over at Berrett-Koehler (they have a really different model for publishing). He ends with the Reading List (here and here) which includes this month Smartbomb, One Billion Customers, and Let My People Go Surfing.

This Week - 11/28/05

I know everyone is trying to wind themselves back up after the four day weekend. Here are a few of things to get you going:

We are doing our grand opening at inBubbleWrap. We have pulled together some really great stuff for this week. My only hint is that you DO NOT want to miss tomorrow.

This week will we be posting two author interviews. I should have them both up today. First is a talk with Wes Moss, author of Starting from Scratch. The second is with Tim Harford, author of The Undercover Economist. You will be able to find those over on the Podcasts Blog.

I am sure there will be other bits and pieces. This month of December is slower for business books. The next big release is the first week of the New Year.

Have a great week!

Tom's Take on Peter Drucker

Peter Drucker’s work calls two masters to mind: Bob Marley and William Shakespeare. What About Bob, you ask. Well, Drucker brings Marley to mind (my mind at least) for his central, solar, role in his universe. There’s no musical genre so dominated by one artist as reggae music is by Bob Marley. Linton Kwesi Johnson gets my vote as a genius, sure, but the scope and influence and genius of Marley animates all. Likewise Drucker with management writing: his oeuvre recapitulates virtually everything meaningful in the field.

And while it’s overblown to compare him with Shakespeare as a canon of world literature, reading Drucker invariably triggers a sense of executive déjà vu. His ideas feel so familiar compared with every major business idea that has come upon the scene…since his work. As the Economist says, “The biggest problem with evaluating Mr. Drucker’s influence is that so many of his ideas have passed into conventional wisdom—in other words, he is the victim of his own success.�

The intellectual debt to Drucker dwarfs that of the US trade deficit. Case in point: I’m re-reading The Effective Executive, which contains the key ideas of Brian Tracy, The One-Minute Manager, and much of David Allen, for starters. And there in chapter five, “First Things First,� which deals with prioritizing, Drucker riffs on the need for companies to make brutal strategic choices when pursuing opportunity. His assertion that “in business the successful companies are not those that work at developing new products for their existing line but those that aim at innovating new technologies or new businesses� basically sets the table for the works of Clay Christensen, Adrian Slywotzky, Chris Zook, and Blue Ocean Strategy, to name a few. And catch this gem from his brief intro to My Years with General Motors: “Leadership is not charisma. It is not public relations. It is not showmanship. It is performance, consistent behavior, trustworthiness.� Searching for A Corporate Savior: The Irrational Quest for Charismatic CEOs anyone?

Unfortunately there’s been some backlash to the myriad Drucker tributes that have appeared over the past few weeks (I’m not going to link to them). Essentially, a few folks have complained about the sentimentality of some of the tributes, while others have argued that if Drucker was so influential, more people would be benefiting from his ideas today.

Point one rebuttal. Yes, many folks are verklempt about Drucker’s passing, even those who never met him. But why gripe about his ability to spark a personal response? I always admired Drucker for more than his ideas; his life was instructive and inspiring as well. Peter Drucker was a rare business guru who actually lived according to the powerful principles he counseled to others. It’s hard enough to articulate a set of ideas that help other people get things done in the world, and tougher still to find a way for them to take root. And yet those accomplishments are mere training wheels compared to the X Games bicycle stunt competition of actually living by the ideals you preach. The lifecycle of consultancies fueled by fads is about as short and heated as Vinnie “the Microwave� Johnson’s hot spells for the Detroit Pistons. For a number of very good reasons, when it comes to the world of management thinking and consulting, genius doesn’t scale. The think tanks preaching speed-to-market take twice as long as others to produce articles and books; the guru preaching flat organizations creates companies with more job titles than your basic film credits. There’s rarely much intellectual alignment between great business ideas and the secular practice of spreading these principles, let along living them.

That’s where Drucker taught by example. He wasn’t just productive, he was effective. He didn’t do things or projects, he got results. And he realized them on a massive scale by communicating his ideas to people who applied them powerfully. He focused his time and energy on what he did best. Simple and sensible, and yet so difficult. My current hero in this regard is Jim Collins, who makes a conscious effort to apply this ideas to his life (that’s a subject for another post.)

Finally, to reply to folks who gripe that Drucker should have been more influential. Bunk. The barriers to excellence here have nothing to do with the quality of his thinking or the way he delivered it. To paraphrase a guy I already cited, the fault, dear brute, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.

"Don't Trust, Just Verify"

With all the hype about Freakonomics this year, it's no wonder that Steven D. Levitt, coauthor of the book, was asked for his "Golden Rule" in the December issue of Business 2.0. The Business 2.0 section is called "My Golden Rule"; it consists of success secrets of 30 leaders.

What's Levitt's Golden Rule?

Don't Trust, Just Verify
So much of what we hear and what we're taught turns out to be false on closer scrutiny. Whether it is expert advice, what you read in the paper, or what your mother told you, if it is important, take the time to figure out for yourself whether it is really true.

While I found each of the 30 rules to be worthwhile in their own right, these are two that stuck out:

Warren Buffett's Golden Rule:

There Can't Be Two Yous
When you get out of bed in the morning and think about what you want to do that day, ask yourself whether you'd like others to read about it on the front page of tomorrow's newspaper. You'll probably do things a little differently if you keep that in mind.

Blake Ross's (co-creator of Firefox) Golden Rule:

The Next Big Thing Is Whatever Make the Last Big Thing Usable
We focus on the everyday problems that nag at everyday people. There are more than enough to go around without imagining new ones.

NYT 100 Notable Books

The NYT recently posted a list of the 100 Notable Books of the Year.

Included in the list are a few notable business books. Here are the business books and the quips from the NYT.

• Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. By Jared Diamond. (Viking, $29.95.) In ''Guns, Germs, and Steel'' (1997), Diamond speculated on how the world reached its present pecking order of nations; his latest book examines geographic and environmental reasons some societies have fallen apart.
• Conspiracy of Fools: A True Story. By Kurt Eichenwald. (Broadway, $26.) A meticulous dissection of the rise and fall of Enron by a correspondent for The New York Times.
• Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. By Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. (Morrow, $25.95.) A maverick scholar and a journalist apply economic thinking to everything from sumo wrestlers who cheat to legalized abortion and the falling crime rate.

FT Finalists Share Favorite Books

We shared with you yesterday the winner of the FT/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.

Today, Financial Times has a follow-up piece asking all of the finalists what business books they like:

• John Battelle (The Search) - Moneyball by Michael Lewis; "I read it early, and knew it was going to be a very big book - it had all the elements: strong characters, a great narrative driving the book, a wonderful topic - at least in the US - and the wonderful element of a counterintuitive hook that seemed, upon quick reflection, to be obvious"
• Pietra Rivoli (Travels of a T-shirt in The Global Economy) - Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution by Ivy Pinchbeck; "It was written almost 75 years ago, but it is still the best work on the topic of industrialization. Unfortunately, such a book could never be written today. Though her research is astonishing in its depth, Pinchbeck uses none of the jargon that has accompanied the narrowing of the disciplines, she glides back and forth from economics to sociology, labour relations to gender studies, without ever mentioning any of these words."
• Constantinos C. Markides (Fast Second) - The Mind of a Strategist by Kenichi Ohmae; "a book that was originally published more than 25 years ago. The author shows that developing strategy is more an art than a science and that intuition is as important as analysis - both important points that we seem to have forgotten in the past 20 years!"
• Steven Levitt (Freakonomics) - A Whack on The Side of The Head by Roger von Oech and Stephen Dubner (Freakonomics) - Choice and Consequence by Thomas Schelling; "From one of the most creative economists in history, a hugely readable and vastly educational look at how economic thinking can be applied to any aspect of life."
• James Stewart (DisneyWar) - All The King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
• Thomas Friedman (The World Is Flat) - A Whole New Mind by Dan Pink

Dancing on Bubble Wrap

Like Bubble Wrap?
Like business?
Like free stuff?

So do we. I bring it (or try to) to my Grandma each Christmas as an extra little stocking stuffer (really, I do).

We enjoy the above three items so much (Bubble Wrap, business and free stuff) that we created inBubbleWrap. It's the place to go for free business stuff. Yes, stuff is general. While we are focusing on business books, there is some other business items in there -- magazines, consulting, and the like.

If you haven't checked it out yet, today is an excellent day to look at it. Today's offer is Sally Hogshead's Radical Careering. I love the book. It's a small little book full of tips to make your career, life and job radical.

In my opinion, one of the best parts about inBubbleWrap is that each day there's a new offer for you to enter. So if you don't like the offer of the day, you can always come back the next day and check out a new prize. Honestly, there's something for everyone.

Test your luck, here. Perhaps you'll find a reason to dance on Bubble Wrap. We'd love to see you there.

Blogging About A Book About Blogging

Debbie Weil is writing a book for Portfolio on corporate blogging. She met with her publisher (and our friend) Adrian Zackhiem to talk about the book. You can read about their conversation here.

For all you aspiring writers out there, Adrian recommended to Debbie Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life.

The State of Business Books

In the last week, there have been two great pieces written on the state of business books.

The first comes from Simon London at the Financial Times. His article runs under the title Who moved my business book?. London asks throughout the article "What is a great business book?" and "How come I get so many bad ones?". He laments about all of "The 71 Ways To Faster Growth" and "The 23 Basic Laws of Leadership" type books. He says there is only one or two books a decade that have any lasting impact (we would agree).

The second was written by our own Jack Covert. The piece is titled No More Business As Usual ran in Publishers Weekly. Though it came out before London's piece, it is a bit of an answer to it. In the essay, Jack makes the case that the business book category is not as bad off as everyone makes it out to be. He says the business book is changing:

• The World Is Flat and Freakonomics are business books.
• These books are written well
• New mediums are being used to sell books; launch the idea and then sell the book
• And design is starting to matter more.

And the Winner Is...

November 21, 2005:

Thomas Friedman today won the inaugural Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award THE WORLD IS FLAT: A Brief History of the Globalized World in the 21st Century published by Penguin.

Congratulations to all. I loved the list of finalists. Check it out.

Tom E. just pointed out that Simon London wrote a FT piece on the award last week. Here it is.

A Little Humor

Stooples is a new parody book on business. I'm guessing you can, without too much imagination, guess what it's spoofing. It features everything from a rumor mill, a podium security blanket, and a chia boss.

Since it's Thanksgiving week and it's always nice to have a little break, we'll be posting a few excerpts from Stooples throughout the week. Check them out here.

Lots o' Stuff

In Monday’s November 21, 2005 Wall Street Journal is a ton of good stuff. One of the articles is about a subject I have been interested in for a long time. The article is about learning to be a boss. I especially like the fact that Erin White, the author, broke the article down to five common mistakes.

1. Wanting to be pals with your former peers and not establishing your credibility as a boss


2. Asserting your new authority too harshly and coming down too hard on former peers


3. Not giving a problem employee honest feedback because you don’t like conflict—then surprising him at a performance review.


4. Wanting to keep doing the work yourself, rather than developing your employees’ skills


5. Assuming employees know exactly what you want them to do without giving them specific direction

Then Jim Collins talks about his new monograph on Good to Great and the Social Sector. The WSJ explains that [sub. needed]:

Mr. Collins now says that great leadership involves not just his traditional virtues, but also the prosaic, City Hall knack of cobbling together coalitions to get things done. He calls this "legislative leadership," built upon persuasion, political currency and shared interests.

Links to Other Peter Drucker Tributes

To end out this week dedicated to Peter Drucker, here a few more links to various Drucker tributes and articles:

The Economist -- Trusting the teacher in the grey-flannel suit

Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania -- Farewell, Peter Drucker: A Tribute to an Intellectual Giant

BusinessWeek -- The Man Who Invented Management: Why Peter Drucker's ideas still matter

Forbes -- Peter Drucker’s Final Interview

The Wall Street Journal -- In His Words

USA Today -- Management guru Drucker told it like it was

Inc.

-- Flashes of Genius
-- Peter's Principles
-- The Uber Mentor
-- When Peter Drucker Speaks

Learning about Lean -- Drucker Tribute

Evolving Excellence -- Rest Well, Peter Drucker

BusinessPundit.com -- Peter Drucker Got it Right

Drucker Archives -- a little bit of everything Drucker

Leader to Leader Institute

-- Several quotes from various "Thought Leaders"
-- Links to a lot of Peter Drucker articles

Lisa Berkowitz on Peter Drucker

I've always had a thing for older, brilliant men, so when Peter Drucker entered my life fifteen years ago, I thought I died and went to heaven.

Drucker was a very low maintenance author, and, unlike other business gurus, shunned the spotlight. Peter would simply call me occasionally to check on reviews or request books. He would start every conversation by identifying himself. "This is Peter Drucker," he would say slowly and methodically, as if that distinctive Viennese accent could possibly belong to anyone else.

I had the privilege to work with Peter on The Effective Executive, Post-Capitalist Society, Managing In Turbulent Times, Management Challenges in the 21st Century and The Essential Drucker. His authenticity and genius are breathtaking. I may not have an MBA from Harvard, but the experience gave me something much more precious, and something money can't buy. I truly found religion in business through my exposure to Drucker in print and in person. Now it's he who is in heaven with the other management gods.

--
Written By:
Lisa Berkowitz
President
Berkowitz & Associates
Former Associate Publishing Director and VP of Marketing and Communications for HarperBusiness

Robert May on Peter Drucker

I read a lot of books, particularly business books. What I dislike about many of them is that the authors have tunnel-vision. Business is complex, and a one-size-fits-all approach is rarely successful. Authors that present their business ideas as a panacea ignore the importance of context in business decision making.

Peter Drucker had no tunnel-vision. His writings, when taken in small excerpts, can often seem confusing and contradictory, but a wide survey of Drucker writings reveal that is not the case. Drucker simply realized that there is never an absolute answer – that business is about tradeoffs, and that context is important when making business decisions.

So why read Drucker? Because it is the best way to learn how to think about business. His books give you insights into his mind and thought process. Instead of teaching you to apply the same approach across a variety of problems, Drucker shows you how to analyze a business problem and make good solid decisions that take all the major factors into account. He points out the counterintuitive nature of many business solutions, and he is a master at balancing the needs of the various stakeholders involved.

If you have never read Peter Drucker, I would suggest beginning with The Daily Drucker, The Effective Executive, or The Essential Drucker. To close, I will leave you with a few of major favorite Peter Drucker quotes.

Management by objectives works if you first think through your objectives. Ninety percent of the time you haven't.

Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately generate into hard work.

So much of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to work.

There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.

--
Written By:
Robert May
May has an MBA from the University of Kentucky. He is a consultant and entrepreneur.
You can read his blog at www.businesspundit.com.

Michael Ballé on Peter Drucker

I mourn Peter Drucker’s passing greatly, because, to my mind, he was the business writer. No other business author I’ve read comes even close. He created the genre, and he remained its best exponent. His enduring influence was less about his individual positions on topical matters than it was about his unique ability to trigger insights in his many readers. Every other business person I meet has had a "Drucker moment", when a comment, or an anecdote has spurred a profound "aha!" experience.

Freddy Ballé, my Gold Mine co-author, recounts hearing Peter Drucker respond in an interview to the "raiders" phenomenon in the eighties. Even vultures, Drucker explained, have a role to play in nature. Running a company is hard work, and CEOs much prefer doing spectacular deals with their peers in closed rooms, which will make them look good. So companies grow through acquisitions, mergers, joint venture, and so on. As they do, they accumulate layer after layer of fat, until they collapse under their own weight, at when it finally happens, the vultures are there to tear the company apart and put the individual components back into the circuit. Whenever Freddy hears about one more "major" deal being made, he thinks about the cow being fattened for the vultures. And all that time and energy spent deal making, is not spent running the business.

My own Drucker moment occurred reading a passage opposing Taylorism and Marxism. Drucker claims that Frederick Taylor is the great hero who saved the western world from the international worker’s revolution. His argument is that by finding a way to dramatically increase productivity without making workers work harder, but by using staff functions to make workers work smarter, Taylor opened up a brave new world in which the worker’s son becomes an engineer, the engineer’s daughter becomes a marketing executive and so on. Right or wrong, the argument was so powerful that it immediately forced me to reevaluate my prejudices about Taylor’s work, and rediscover the very basis of work organization.

But most of all, what I always liked about reading Drucker was his own very human focus on the fact that management is about human beings, and his profound respect for front-line workers. I was struck years ago, when I started working in the healthcare field, by his description of "Nurse Bryan." In his 1966 book The Effective Executive, Drucker describes how a new hospital administrator, in a staff meeting, thought that a difficult matter had been resolved when one of the participant’s asked: “Would this have satisfied Nurse Bryan?� At once the argument started all over and did not subside until a new and much more ambitious solution to the problem had been hammered out. Nurse Bryan had been a long serving and now retired nurse at the hospital, who would always ask, “are we doing the best we can do to help this patient?� Patients on Nurse Bryan’s floor did better and recovered faster. Gradually, the hospital staff had learned to adopt ‘Nurse Bryan’s rule’. This, to me is pure Drucker. Although he was one of the strongest advocates of “management�, with all the unfortunate fall-out we now know of, he never lost sight of the profound and abiding value of individual contribution, and commitment of workers to doing their job well, for a better world.

Over the years, I’ve had many a “Drucker moment,� often triggered by some of his more improbable notions, such as the idea that what explains both the Jesuits and the Calvinist’s runaway success was the simple practice of writing down their expectations for the coming period, and then comparing it to what really happened, and learning from the process. Or his description of Britain’s Indian Empire run uniquely through a process of inspections and long reports to the crown. In any case, regardless of the historical veracity of his examples, or the accuracy of his descriptions, every other Peter Drucker passage is so full of incomparable intuition that I’ve always felt more intelligent by the virtue of reading his books (a feeling which unfortunately fades away quickly after putting the book down.)

It’s such a shame that the world has lost this incredible pen, and this treasured source of insights. Certainly, Peter Drucker’s example has sponsored many vocations, and new, talented business writers emerge every day, but I fear that the original formula is now irretrievably lost, and we’re all the poorer for it. Still, his books remain, and although some general propositions are now somewhat faded, the specifics of his thinking are still as insightful and ever, and remain an ever-fresh source of inspiration.

--
Written By:
Michael Ballé
Author with Freddy Ballé of The Gold Mine: A Novel of Lean Transformation.

CGU President Robert Klitgaard on Peter Drucker

It is with great sadness that I announce the passing of Peter Drucker, internationally renowned author and consultant, "the father of modern management," the Marie Rankin Clarke Professor of Social Science and Management, husband, father, grandfather, dear friend, and cherished colleague.

Peter passed away on November 11, 2005; he was 95 years old. Our thoughts and prayers are with his wife of 68 years, Doris, and their four children and six grandchildren, and all of those who were close to this extraordinary man.

Peter’s career as a writer, consultant, and teacher spanned an incredible 75 years. His groundbreaking work turned modern management theory into a serious discipline.

As Dean Kees de Kluyver of the Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management observes, "What distinguishes Peter Drucker from many other thought leaders in my mind is that he cared not just about how business manages its resources, but also how public and private organizations operate morally and ethically within society. He respected the values of education, personal responsibility, and business’ accountability to society. His true legacy is his insistence on this value system, and its effect on business, society, and individual lives."

Peter received numerous awards and citations throughout his career. In 2002 he received our nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Peter Drucker arrived in Claremont in 1971, and our school of management has born his name since 1987. His presence and dedication to its mission has brought prestige, honor, and resources to both the School and the University. The School adheres to Peter’s philosophy that management is a liberal art—one that takes into account not only economics, but also history, social theory, law, and the sciences. His integrating vision inspires the entire university in our commitment to transdisciplinary study.

Over the coming days, there will be numerous tributes to Peter and his amazing contributions. CGU will come together – in accordance with the family’s wishes – to celebrate Peter’s life in the near future. In the meantime, I invite each of you to reflect on what Peter’s legacy means to you and how working together we can carry it forward, in our work and in the way we live. CGU, through the School that bears his name and the Drucker Institute, is committed to carrying Peter’s legacy forward and we invite executives, scholars, writers, and representatives from all sectors to join us in this important task.

You can visit this link on the CGU website to remember this internationally recognized man and our friend, Peter F. Drucker.

--
Written By:
Robert Klitgaard
President, Claremont Graduate University

Paul B. Brown on Peter Drucker

I was 25 and working as a feature writer for the Newark, N.J. newspaper, The Star-Ledger, when I was hired by Forbes.

That was the good news.

The bad news was I didn’t know the first thing about business. So I bought the technical books—everything from how to read a balance sheet, to what the 100 day moving average was suppose to tell us about where the stock market was headed. I got the gist fairly quickly, but they didn’t teach me much about how to think about business.

“Read Drucker,� the guy across the hall—a man who had business journalism awards named after him—told me, when I expressed my confusion.

And so I did.

What I found was that Drucker had a way of making both neophytes like me, and geniuses like Jack Welch (a Drucker disciple) truly understand how to get to the heart of any business issue by asking simple questions and delivering universal truths:

• What business are you really in?


• If you weren’t already in your business, would you enter it today?


• What gets measured gets done.

One of the questions we asked was, what are you most proud of.

"A few people for whom I made a difference."

The number was far from few.

--
Written By:
Paul B. Brown
Author of numerous business books including
Customers for Life: How to Turn That One-Time Buyer Into a Lifetime Customer.

Dan Pink on Peter Drucker

Several months ago, when A Whole New Mind came out, my publisher and I sent copies of the book to several dozen thought leaders, opinion makers, and other notables. I received a handful of letters and emails in response. But only one letter did I tack to my office wall, right beside my iMac. I see it each time I sit down to write. It’s a short note from Peter Drucker, thanking me for the book and telling me he found it -- cue the skeptical Austrian accent -- “most interesting.�

In that gesture is my small remembrance of Peter Drucker. Because in that gesture is a legacy of Drucker’s life that has gone largely unremarked.

Everyone knows that Drucker invented the field of management. His contributions to business thinking were monumental. All of us who have the good fortune to study and write about business for a living stand on his (and, I would argue, Tom Peters’s) shoulders.

But Drucker’s greatest legacy – at least to me, if you’ll forgive my personalizing this tribute – is not so much what he said. It’s how he lived. Forget the brilliance of his thought. Look at the texture of his life. The man was a glorious role model.

Three examples:

He worked his butt off and never became complacent. With all his accomplishments, Drucker could have started phoning it in 30 years ago. He didn’t. He pushed and pushed and pushed. He wrote more than a dozen books after he turned 65! Amazing.

He was a non-stop learner. Drucker said that every few years he liked to master a new subject. That’s why this Austrian guy with a law degree and penchant for economics decided to study . . . Japanese art. He became an expert, of course. But more important than this particular expertise was the broader lesson: There’s always more to learn – and the most valuable learning often exists outside the cramped cabin of “management.� Drucker’s long life proved the principle: Being curious is the only way to be fully alive.

He devoted himself to a higher cause. The essence of Drucker’s philosophy was that, at its best, business could be about something noble. Business – in contrast to centralized government, which he once called “obese, muscle-bound, and senile� – offered a powerful way to liberate human potential and elevate our lives. He counseled companies not only to perform better, but also to be better. And he pressed himself to be better as well. He devoted much of his later life to advising non-profit groups (though he often made them write a check he never cashed so they knew the full value of his advice.) Drucker lived modestly, but his reason for living wasn’t modest at all: He wanted to change the world.

One packet of advice that Ducker often dispensed was to set goals for a six-month segment – and then revisit those goals at the end of the six months. I started doing that about ten years ago – and it has been profoundly helpful. But for my next set of six month goals – and most likely every set thereafter – I’ll have a new entry: Be more like Ducker, the man whose gracious and unexpected note hangs on my wall.

Written By:
Dan Pink
Author of A Whole New Mind
and Free Agent Nation

We're Not Making This Up

On the online site for Business Week yesterday you could find this interesting comment in a book review. In the section of what's Good about One Billion Customers: Lessons from the Front Line of China, the review noted "A colorful and cautionary how-to by an experienced China hand." And in the Bad category: "Its strength may also be a weakness. This is strictly a practical business book." Yes, correct: Business Week's book review of a business book faults the subject for being too much about business. In related news, Scientific American gives a thumbs down to a Stephen Hawking title that would have appealed more as a novel; and the New York Review of Books pans a book for being too bookish.

Adrian Zackheim on Peter Drucker

Noel Tichy once commented to me that there was very little you could say about management that Drucker hadn't said before and better.

Given his stature, Drucker was immensely courteous and generous about the work of other writers. And if he couldn't endorse a book, he could be extraordinary forthcoming with corrective commentary. I often wondered how he found the time. A cursory reading of Drucker indicates a profoundly humanistic intellect, and an outlook that was hardly bounded by the usual concerns of a manager or corporate bureaucrat. Drucker was an intellectual and a journalist first; a collector of Japanese art and much else; AS WELL AS a management authority extraordinaire.

When I arrived at Harper in 1994, Drucker had been a house author for over four decades. Cass Canfield, Jr. was editing him very ably, but Drucker requested a meeting with me as his new Publisher. Among other things, Drucker was fascinated by digital technology. The CD-ROM craze was just hitting. And he thought that as the new guy, I might have a grip on what might be in it for him. Cass and I wondered what materials he might have lying around that might be turned into a digital product. Eventually, Cass and I found ourselves on a plane to Los Angeles for a day-long visit with Doris and Peter. We spoke about converting various Drucker speeches into a CD-ROM, but the craze subsided before we were able to marshal our forces.

The Druckers were exceptionally hospitable, riveting conversationalists with a vast range of interests. They were fully engaged in everything that was going on in the world, though they were both in their mid 80s at the time.
Unsurprisingly, Drucker had a very clear vision of his publishing catalog and about the effect on his backlist of publishing various collections and omnibus editions. He gave a fascinating account of his early career as a journalist in Germany -- he was one of the youngest editors ever of a major daily there -- and of the circumstances that brought him to the attention of General Motors.

Aside from showing him a few cover designs, I can't say that I had much of a role in a Drucker publication. But I remember the man very fondly and, of course, his influence on our field is absolutely primary.

Written By:
Adrian Zackheim
Publisher
Portfolio (an imprint of the Penguin Group)

Bob Nelson on Peter Drucker

Dr. Peter F. Drucker (1909-2005)
The Father of Modern Management

Much can be said about the visionary, Peter Drucker, and his uncanny ability to cut to the core of things and make simple, provocative and well-supported insights that would systematically reshape the nature of business time and time again. Stating what was obvious before anyone else could see it was one of his trademarks that earned his much deserved reputation as a consultant's consultant and advisor to corporate CEOs.

Much less has been said of his equally effective teaching style. Dr. Drucker was from the classical style of teaching: He'd make a point then launch into a lengthy discourse for twenty or more minutes drawing from musical theory, the Spanish-American War, surgical procedures and various other seemingly unrelated fields, until he had woven a tapestry of evidence and come full-circle to his original observation, convincing you along the way that his conclusion was, in fact, the truth.

I used to drive him home after class where he lived in a modest house, like any other in the neighborhood. He advised me to learn the insights of my topic of interest through fieldwork prior to trying to prove those insights through research -- practical advice which I've strived to follow ever since.

Written By:
Bob Nelson, Ph.D.
Author, 1001 Ways to Reward Employees and a
graduate of The Peter F. Drucker Graduate School
of Management at Claremont Graduate University,
Pomona, California

The Daily Drucker

In honor of Peter Drucker, we're doing a Drucker tribute at 8cr this week. There will be insights from those who knew him well and those who learned a lot from him. Earlier this morning, we did a Tom Peters' post on Drucker.

Here you can find a few Drucker highlights from our blog entries:

As Todd mentioned on Friday, last December he posted Jim Collins' Foreword to The Daily Drucker. You can read it here.

You can also check out what Drucker has to say about these subjects:

• Facing reality
• Customers
• Manufacturing
• New ventures

Another Drucker link that may be of interest to you is his bibliography.

And finally, you can share some of Drucker's wisdom with others by visiting the HarperCollins website.

Tom Peters calls Peter F. Drucker "The Right Man for His/Our Times"

I don’t like Robert McNamara, circa 1966. (I was in Vietnam at the time.) I think his overly analytic approach to warmaking contributed greatly to the Vietnam quagmire-fiasco. But I do appreciate the Robert McNamara who assisted U.S. Army Air Force General Curtis LeMay at the outset of World War II. To grossly oversimplify, LeMay didn't know how many planes he had or where they were. McNamara came aboard and fixed that. After the war, McNamara was one of the handful of "Whiz Kids" who brought Ford into the modern world by, in effect, doing the same thing for Henry Ford that he had done earlier for General LeMay.

Robert McNamara and Peter Drucker "arrived on the scene" at roughly the same time. And faced an/the same intriguing issue. In short, whether the military or big corporations, organizational size and complexity had far outstripped the toolkit available to manage these busting-out-of-their-pants behemoths.

Jack Welch was not the first CEO of GE, though to read Fortune in the '90s one might have thought so. And Peter Drucker didn’t "invent" management. The Chinese probably did thousands of years ago—among other things, Sun Tzu’s roughly 2,500-year-old The Art of War is a full-blown "management" text. So, too, Machiavelli's The Prince. And Frederick Taylor’s century-old The Principals of Scientific Management.

But Peter Drucker did arguably

1. "invent" modern management as we now think of it
2. give the study and craft of management-as-profession credibility and visibility, even though biz schools like Harvard had been around for a long time
3. provide a (the first?) comprehensive toolkit-framework for addressing and even mastering the problems of emergent enterprise complexity.

And he did something else incredibly important: He popularized the study of-appreciation of modern management. Doubtless Mr Drucker would have been appalled to be described as a “popularizer�—after all, that was one of his abiding and biting criticisms of me. But the truth is that, thought his consulting was carried out in the stratospheric confines of CEO-world, his books and articles were very comprehensible and accessible to the likes of LTJG Thomas J Peters, USN, in 1968 when Peters, age 25, left Vietnam and was assigned to a forces management team in the Pentagon. No, the Stanford Graduate School of Business from which Peters got an MBA six years later, in 1972, did not assign as much as a single word of Drucker’s work. But in 1968 Peters read (devoured!) his first management text, Drucker’s The Effective Executive—and was profoundly influenced by it. LTJG Peters was hardly alone!

To be sure, Drucker wrote continuously on a variety of issues; he was a genuine polymath. His comprehensive pieces in The Atlantic, for instance, covered an absurdly wide spectrum of human endeavor. Yet Drucker, correctly, will not be known for that work, and personally I don’t think his historical significance will hinge on “inventing� the “knowledge worker.� Rather, it will rest on works such as The Concept of the Corporation (1946), The Practice of Management (1954) and The Effective Executive (1967), which are the tracts that launched the “practice of management� as we know it to this day—and probably as we will know it for decades to come.

Tom Peters/Las Vegas/11.13.2005

A New Ad Book Classic?

Adweek is asking in their front page poll "Which of the following new books has the best chance at becoming the next Confessions of an Advertising Man by David Ogilvy?"

Your choices are:

• Often Wrong, Never In Doubt by Donny Duetsch (I think you know where we stand)
• Disruption by Jean-Marie Dru (this is a Tom Peters favorite)
• Then We Set His Hair On Fire by Phil Dusenberry (liked it alot)
• Purple Cow by Seth Godin (a classic)
• Life After The 30-Second Spot by Joe Jaffe (review copy in mail)
• Lovemarks by Kevin Roberts (lots of pretty pictures)
• None of the Above (the correct answer)

(via Mr. Jaffe's blog)

Jim Collins from The Daily Drucker

Last December, we posted the foreword that Jim Collins wrote for The Daily Drucker. We thought it was a great story to start the tribute:

In December of 1994, I pulled up to Peter Drucker’s house in my rental car. I rechecked the address because the house just didn’t seem big enough. It was a nice house in a neighborhood near the Claremont Colleges, bordered tightly by similar suburban houses, with two small Toyotas parked in the drive. It would have been a perfect, modestly proportioned home for a professor from the local college. But I wasn’t looking for a professor from the local college; I was looking for Peter Drucker—the leading founder of the field of management, the most influential management thinker in the second half of the twentieth century, the founding father of the Peter F. Drucker Graduate School of Management...

it continues here...

Drucker Dies at 95

I think it is impossible to determine the impact that Peter Drucker made on business. His clarity of thought on the subject was unmatched.

We'll have a lot to say next week about his contribution to business and management next week.

Here are articles from Bloomberg Press and the LA Times.

Oops. I forgot to mention...

The other day I wrote about the latest ChangeThis manifestos. (Haven't heard about ChangeThis? Learn more.) This morning, Todd and I chatted about how ChangeThis is coming along. I found out that a lot of people may not realize that the manifesto (definition below) writers are many times just people who have something to say. The writers can be anyone from that guy who works the grocery story cash register to the local soccer mom. This month's releases were ALL slushpile manifestos -- meaning that they were voted upon by ChangeThis visitors and ranked in the top few proposals for that month.

The ideas featured in manifestos are typically the things that just sit there and ferment in someone's brain. I imagine you have many of those ideas just sitting there waiting to be heard or perhaps you know a friend who has an innovative idea about how to solve the world's problems or something else that's particularly witty. If so, check out ChangeThis's submit a proposal page.

Not quite ready to submit a proposal or write a manifesto? Vote on the current manifesto proposals.

Bestseller Brought Back

One of the treasures we uncovered on our trip to New York was a new edition to Napolean Hill's Think and Grow Rich from publisher Tarcher Penguin.

This is the grandfather of books on motivational thought. Hill was a journalist that Andrew Carnegie hired to find out what the formula of success was. In the 25 year journey to the answer, Hill interviewed 500 millionaires and published his finding in 1937. The book has sold over 15 million copies in its almost seven decade run.

There are several things I like about this new edition. This version was revised and updated by Arthur Pell. Some additional material uses more recent examples of Bill Gates and Michael Jordan to illustrate points. The packaging is well done with the rough cut pages and french covers (i.e. a soft cover with folded flaps to mimic a dust cover). And it's only $10. You rarely see me mention price, but that is a great price point.

Time Magazine's All Time 100 Novels

With Jack sneaking into the office and posting on fiction, I thought some of you might like to check out Time Magazine's All Time 100 Novels. Time critics Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo have picked the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to now. You can also see how readers are ranking the list.

P.S. They have done the same for movies too.

It's All About Balance

Yesterday, I talked about the methodology that Alfred Marcus used to write Big Winners and Big Losers.

Today, I want to talk about the findings. In one word it is about balance. What Marcus found was that companies need to balance agility, discipline, and focus.

Balance makes for a resilient company that is able to thrive in the long run under all cirsumstances. Many managers make the mistake of thinking they know which wat things are headed, so they throw all their eggs in one basket. They purposefully become unbalanced only to regret it later when conditions change. In the heyday of the tech boom, Intel was way out in front in agility only to regret it later when company executives realized they had sacrificed discipline for agility and allowed arch-rival AMD to creep precariously close in the firm's core microprocessor markets.

They way to prepare for future scenarios of different kinds isto maintain a balanced portfolio of qualities. The unbalanced firm might achieve short-term successes, but it will not sustain long-term success.

What caught my attention is the unique message here. In business, we seem to want to be either right brained or left brained. It is either the innovate, be crazy, Tom Peters camp or the focus, focus, focus, Jim Collins camp. I realize the message is not as sexy or as clear as both camps would like, but companies need both. I think Seth said you need to be both creating cows and milking them.

In Appendix A of the book, I found the best summary of strategy books I have seen. Marcus is making the point about how business books are either agility-based or discipline/focus-based. I have published the whole thing over on the Excerpts blog. It is really interesting to read down through what all the heavyweights have had to say.

What I Did On My Vacation

I have been on vacation this week. Now I take two kinds of vacations. Vacations where I go away and turn everything off and veg. Then I have vacations where I read in bed for an hour in the mornings, cook soup, putter in the garden and hit the links; these are the vacations where the Blackberry is turned on and I stay in touch with the office. This has been that kind of vacation.

I want to tell you about two books that I have read this week and loved. They aren't my typical suggestions for you as they aren't books about business. I actually read other kinds of books, too. Michael Connelly’s The Lincoln Lawyer is the best lawyer/courtroom book I have read in ages. This guy has been writing really good noir books for years. This is a brighter book with a great plot.

The other book is a coffee table book called The Works: Anatomy of a City by Kate Ascher. This book is hard to explain. As she states in the dust jacket,

All cities, big and small, rely on a vast array of interconnecting systems to take care of their citizens’ most basic needs; keeping water bubbling through the pipes, traffic moving on the streets, power flowing to businesses and homes. Largely invisible, and almost always taken for granted, these are the basic building blocks of urban life. But how exactly do these systems work? Using New York City—among the largest and most complex of world cities—as its point of reference, The Works answers that question.