“I don’t predict. I just look out the window and see what’s visible but not yet seen.”
– Peter F. Drucker the window
March-April 2011
From the Archives Local Links
Letter from Claremont
As Peter Drucker saw things, every
organization “has two—and only these two
—basic functions: marketing and
innovation.”
We’ve been thinking a lot about this
principle lately, as we plan to launch a
revamped website and produce a new
brochure that captures what we do.
Drucker viewed marketing differently
from most people. In fact, he believed that
“marketing” and “selling” are antithetical.
“The aim of marketing is to make
selling superfluous,” Drucker wrote. “The
aim of marketing is to know and understand
the customer so well that the product or
service…sells itself.”
In marketing, we’re lucky to have a
core product that millions of people around
the world clearly value: Drucker’s teachings.
But Drucker also taught that every
product only lives for so long before
becoming obsolete. And that’s where
innovation—”change that creates a new
dimension of performance”—comes in.
It is with this in mind that we are
steadily scaling up programs that treat
Drucker’s ideas not as the end of the story
but, rather, as the beginning. Through our
Drucker for Future Leaders initiative, we’re
teaching high school students basic
management practices so that they can
more effectively design and implement
community-service projects, as well as find
their path to college. Meanwhile, our
Drucker Management Path training system
is using cutting-edge learning design to
bring new life to 60-plus years of writing.
And our blog, the Drucker Exchange, is
illuminating today’s news with timeless
insights.
Or to put it another way, we’re not just
trying to sell Peter Drucker’s legacy; we’re
trying to market it to a new generation.
The Drucker Institute’s new brochure
Rick Wartzman and Zach First
Executive Director and Managing Director
The Drucker Institute does more than just honor the legacy
of Peter Drucker, hailed by BusinessWeek as “the man who
invented management.” We actively build on his ideas and
ideals by touching tens of thousands of lives—everyone from
high school students to corporate CEOs. Why does this matter?
Because as Drucker knew so well, the best way to create
a healthy society is to ensure that all of our institutions are
effectively managed and responsibly led.
The Drucker Institute Claremont Graduate University 1021 North Dartmouth Avenue Claremont, California 91711
(909) 607-9212 contact@DruckerInstitute.com www.DruckerInstitute.com
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Peter Drucker's branding
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p. 2 p. 2
The Drucker Society of India's
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in Mumbai
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The Drucker Institute is an entity of Claremont Graduate University, located at 1021 North Dartmouth Avenue, Claremont, California 91711.
How people around the world are bettering their
communities by applying Peter Drucker’s ideas
Local Links
Our blog, the Drucker Exchange,
hosts an ongoing conversation about
bettering society through effective
management and responsible
leadership. Join in now.
Peter Drucker's teachings on effective
nonprofit management have found a home
in India with the Mumbai office of Habitat
for Humanity, a global NGO which builds
homes alongside impoverished families.
There, volunteers with the Drucker
Society of India have spurred the Habitat
team to undertake quarterly reviews of their
activities to ensure that they lead to the
fulfillment of the organization’s mission.
The Drucker Society underscored “the
importance of listening to our customers
and their needs,” said Georgina Kurian,
chief financial officer of HFH India.
These lessons and others were gleaned
from the Drucker Society Nonprofit Program,
which draws practical insights from what
Drucker called “the five most important
questions you will ever ask about your
organization”: What is our mission? Who is
our customer? What does the customer
value? What are our results? What is our
plan?
As a result of its work with the Drucker
Society, Kurian explained, Habitat in
Mumbai is now considering other steps
such as more tightly integrating the
organization’s signature housing programs
“with livelihood, finance and disaster-mitigation
training programs, depending on
our beneficiaries' needs.”
Drucker Society leaders Deepjee
Singhal and Vaibhav Manek met with
Habitat over several months as part of their
own mission to increase the effectiveness
of nonprofits and NGOs. Singhal noted that
social-sector organizations “are playing an
ever-increasing role” in India.
Manek pointed out that the Drucker
Society was merely taking its cues from
Drucker himself. He “devoted the latter part
of his life to the nonprofit sector and always
saw it as a key player in building a healthy
society," Manek said.
In developing a new tag line for the
Drucker Institute—”Old Wisdom, New
Applications”—we found it useful to look
back at what Peter Drucker had to say to
those managing what is perhaps the
world’s greatest brand: Coca-Cola.
Drucker worked closely with a number
of Coke executives over the years, including
former President Donald Keough.
In this 1992 consulting report,
Drucker’s first suggestion to the company
was to ask: “What values, what
satisfactions, what emotions should Coca-
Cola’s advertising evoke and promote?”
Second, Drucker emphasized the value
of a timely slogan. He praised Coke’s “The
pause that refreshes” campaign, which was
launched in 1929 (and later selected by Ad
Age as one of the Top 10 “slogans of the
century”). That language “clearly
communicated” the satisfaction that Coca-
Cola provides, Drucker wrote. But he also
cautioned that this “was the slogan for a
very different world. What is now needed
is something that equally conveys the
essence of Coca-Cola.”
Finally, he urged Coke executives to
think about the company’s geographic
reach. “Would such a term again, as in the
past, be the right one for promotion
globally?” Drucker asked.
Values, timeliness and geography:
Although we’re 10,000 times smaller than
Coke, these are all factors that we’ve found
helpful to consider. Perhaps your
organization would, too.
From the
Archives
The Drucker Institute’s Rick
Wartzman writes a column for
Bloomberg Businessweek online
that ties Peter Drucker’s work to
today’s headlines. Read the latest.
The Drucker Institute is an affiliate of the Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management.
