is an affiliate of the drucker school of management
For years, top executives from
Procter & Gamble, Edward Jones,
the American Red Cross and
countless other organizations made
the pilgrimage to Peter Drucker’s
home in Claremont to seek his
wisdom. Drucker is no
longer with us, but
business and social-sector
leaders are still
streaming in. These
days, though, they are
seeking each other’s
wisdom.
The venue is a
series of forums
hosted by the Drucker
Institute. The goal is
for participants to
explore various Drucker- inspired
topics by trading insights and
experiences with each other, and to
then take back to their own
companies, nonprofits and
government agencies at least one
good idea they can turn into action.
We used this model just before
the holidays at the Drucker
Innovation Forum, a gathering of two
dozen senior executives from a
remarkably wide range of
organizations. Among them: Boeing,
Coca- Cola, Intuit, the
Rainforest Alliance,
Teach for America and
the Willow Creek
Association.
Attendees spent the
day exploring how to
tackle the most
pressing challenges
they face in managing
innovation. One
example: A major
consumer- products
company is struggling to figure out
how to introduce sustainable
packaging without wrecking its
pricing structure.
Working in small teams— and
benefiting from the incredible
Rick Wartzman, executive director of
the Drucker Institute, writes a column for
Bloomberg Businessweek online that ties
Peter Drucker’s work to today’s headlines.
For a list of all of his columns, click here.
Rick’s recent “ Drucker Difference” columns:
• Drucker Does Spirituality December 17, 2010
• Cloud Computing and Peter Drucker December 3, 2010
• As the Walkman Retires, Sony Rewires November 19, 2010
• The Wall- less Office November 5, 2010
Letter from Claremont
“ The Drucker Difference” on Bloomberg Businessweek
Drucker Society Spotlight
How Drucker Societies worldwide are
advancing effective management and
responsible leadership
The pen may or may not be mightier
than the sword, but it’s definitely mightier
than the clock.
At least that’s what members of the
Drucker Society of Thailand have
discovered by implementing insights on
time management penned by Peter
Drucker in his 1967 classic, The Effective
Executive.
“ We wanted to give our members a
practical way of applying Drucker’s
lessons in their workplace,” said Kitikorn
Dowpiset, the founder of the Thai Society.
“ So we brought together executive
managers, MBA students, academics and
others” in a Drucker book club.
But this isn’t just any book club in
which members simply talk about the text
they’ve read. The goal, according to
Dowpiset, is “ to improve our members’
management skills” and make their
organizations more effective.
Continued on the next page Continued on the next page
claremont graduate university
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THE WINDOW “ I don’t predict. I just look out the window and see what’s visible but not yet seen.”
— Peter F. Drucker
The newsletter of the Drucker Institute www. druckerinstitute. com Jan/ Feb 2011
The 2010 Drucker Innovation Forum
is an affiliate of the drucker school of management
diversity of perspectives in the room— the participants quickly moved to
identifying how to convert such challenges into opportunities. Next week will mark
60 days since the event, and we will be following up with everyone to see how
they’ve applied what they learned at the forum.
Meantime, we’re busy gearing up for the 2011 Drucker CEO Forum, which will
be held in February. Following a design similar to that of the Innovation Forum,
chief executives from about 30 organizations— public, private and nonprofit— will
consider what it means to lead in turbulent times.
All told, we hope we are fulfilling a vision that Peter Drucker laid out for
academic institutions more than 40 years ago: to “ bring together knowledge and
skills from a great many disciplines and integrate them into effective application
outside the university.”
Rick Wartzman and Zach First
Executive Director and Managing Director
Learn more about the
Drucker Management Path training
system, and what it can do for the
managers in your organization.
Innovation has become a hot topic
in the last few years, with titles such as
The Other Side of Innovation, The
Innovator’s Way and Medici Effect:
What Elephants and Epidemics Can
Teach Us About
Innovation flying off
the shelves.
Peter Drucker,
though, was writing
and talking about
innovative
organizations long
before they became
all the rage. In a
lecture from the
1970s, which
recently made its
way to the Drucker
Archives, he
described the shift
from the 19th
century inventor— a
solitary “ great innovator”— to the
“ innovative organization [ that] manages
to innovate without such towering
genius at its head.”
Drucker saw the innovative
organization as “ a human group” that is
constructed for ongoing innovation and
that makes “ change into norm.”
Drucker’s audience was his
Business Enterprise
class, and he seemed
determined to get his
students to realize
that they, too, could
be innovators. “ The
innovative
organization
institutionalizes the
innovative spirit and
creates a habit of
innovation,” he told
them.
He added by way
of encouragement
that there is “ no
dearth of innovative
organizations once
one starts looking for them.” It’s a safe
bet that a few hundred or so authors
writing on the topic today would
wholeheartedly agree.
One member of the Thai Society
who did just that was Sutthisak
Inthawadee of Merlin’s Solutions
International, a consulting firm that
specializes in information and
communication technology.
Inthawadee followed Drucker’s
recommendation in The Effective
Executive to keep a time log to
determine where his hours were
actually going— as well as to spot
those “ time wasters” that could be
delegated to others or eliminated
altogether. By applying this system
throughout his division at Merlin,
Inthawadee has been able to reduce
time spent in meetings by 20
percent.
“ The client meeting is one of
the key activities in our work,” said
Inthawadee. Yet “ time wasted in
meetings was also one of the
biggest problems we faced.” Thanks
to Drucker’s pen, Inthawadee added,
time is now “ under control” at
Merlin.
Society Spotlight, cont’d
Letter from Claremont, cont’d
The newsletter of the Drucker Institute www. druckerinstitute. com Jan/ Feb 2011
FROM THE ARCHIVES
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