The Peter Drucker legacy

In one way or another, armies of managers have sat at the feet of Austrian-born writer, lecturer and consultant Peter Drucker either literally or metaphorically.

He has just died, at the great age of 95, but his legacy is certain to live on.

Drucker specialised in the most powerful of all the management techniques - applied intelligence. He found out truths and drew the right, commonsense conclusions from what he saw.

As a humanist to his fingertips, Drucker knew that business rested on the optimum use of human potential - which meant much that couldn’t be measured or quantified.

This didn’t imply any disregard for numbers, or any other factual tools. Drucker was no mean prophet. This ability - which made him, for example, first to identify the unstoppable rise of the knowledge worker – was based on factual observation.

What Drucker saw was available to anybody. The difference was that Peter absorbed what he saw happening and projected the observed present into the probable future.

The fallibility of mankind, which often leads people to act against their own best interests, is another observable fact. As he once noted, incompetence is the only commodity in inexhaustible supply.

That sounds highly pessimistic. But Drucker seldom veered away from his optimistic view that anything and everything can be improved, if the right questions are asked and the right answers activated.

Drucker believed in making himself understood. He also insisted that preventing collapse required studying the customers - and, very important, the non-customers:

“The first signs of fundamental change rarely appear within one’s own organisation or among one’s own customers.”

It’s now a statement of the obvious that there is no business without a customer, but Drucker was the first to articulate this bedrock truth - and thus gave birth and validity to a whole dynasty of marketing pundits.

He applied a simple formula to the complexities of management.

This boiled down to:

• knowing what to do
• knowing how to do it
• DOING IT!

I’ve capitalised the third stage because of its final and definitive importance. Thanks in very large part to Drucker, ignorance of what to do and how has lessened markedly over the decades since 1954, when Drucker, having discovered an almost total absence of valuable management literature, filled the gap with The Practice of Management.

As I noted earlier, Peter was essentially a humanist, who believed profoundly in treating people like human beings, not as automata.

The flavour of Drucker’s people philosophy comes across clearly in his guidelines for recruitment – the alpha and sometimes the omega of organisational success. Hiring managers have four questions to ask, not of the candidate, note, but of themselves:

• What has the candidate done well?
• What is the person likely to do well?
• What do they have to learn to be able to get the full benefit from their strengths?
• If I had a son or daughter, would I be willing to have them work under this person?

The advice which Drucker offered, to the young candidates and captains of industry alike, very often flew in the face of conventional wisdom. The great manager, like this great thinker, needs to challenge above all.

Teaching, rather then preaching, is the essence of Drucker’s thought and guidance. He saw the folly of panaceas and watched with justified cynicism as the latest management cure-all soared up the charts, heading towards certain eclipse.

Whether they know it or not, though, effective managers will be following in the great man’s giant steps for decades to come.