“I don’t predict. I just look out the window and see what’s visible but not yet seen.”
– Peter F. Drucker the window
May-June 2011
From the Archives Local Links
Letter from Claremont
As we’ve noted in another context,
Peter Drucker was not exactly a technical
whiz, banging out the last of his books on a
Brother typewriter, even though the world
had already entered the Internet age.
And yet Drucker would surely be
smiling at the buzz he and his ideas are
generating on our blog, which just
celebrated its first birthday in its current
format.
In the last year, the Drucker Exchange
has seen more than 123,000 visits, with
readers hailing from nearly 200 countries on
six continents. (Our following outside the
U.S. is bound to rise even further, as we’re
now translating selected Dx posts in
Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese and
Spanish, with Korean soon to be added.)
The best part is that these aren’t drive-by
readings. Those coming to the Dx are
highly engaged, with more than 6% of visits
to the site resulting in a comment, tweet or
share (through a Facebook “Like,” for
instance). That’s quite a robust number by
web standards, producing more than 1,200
interactions so far in 2011.
The reason for all this active
participation: By tying Drucker’s timeless
wisdom to issues that are particularly
timely—subsidies for Big Oil, management
practices at Google, the threat of rising
inflation, McDonald’s hiring 50,000 new
workers—we seem to be giving our readers
(whether they’re already familiar with
Drucker or not) something of real value.
“For us, a business blog makes the cut
if it meets one simple yet difficult-to-achieve
criteria: After you read it, the writer
makes you consider or contemplate better
ways to operate your business,”The Daily
Herald of Everett, Wash., asserted recently,
as it named the Dx one of “five blogs
business owners must read.”
Boy, do we Like that.
The most popular Dx post in the past 30 days
Rick Wartzman and Zach First
Executive Director and Managing Director
Prof. Drucker’s final paper
assignment for his
“Management Process” course
p. 2 p. 2
A Drucker Society innovation
workshop in Hawaii
The newsletter of
www.DruckerInstitute.com
The Drucker Institute is an entity of Claremont Graduate University, located at 1021 North Dartmouth Avenue, Claremont, California 91711.
The Fab Five: “What are the qualities
that the best leaders exhibit?”
How people around the world are bettering their
communities by applying Peter Drucker’s ideas
Local Links
Join us at the next Drucker Global
Forum in Vienna, Austria.
November 3-4, 2011
“A Quest for Legitimacy—How
Managers Can Shape the Future”
As the economy continues to rebound
in fits and starts, many political leaders,
analysts and executives have declared that
unlocking innovation is the key to a robust
recovery.
But how do you actually go about
achieving that?
For answers, a group of Hawaiian
leaders from all sectors—public, private
and nonprofit—recently turned out for a
Drucker Society Innovation Workshop in
Honolulu.
“Hawaii’s economy is just beginning to
recover,” noted Craig Chong of the Drucker
Society of the United States, who delivered
the program to about 20 attendees. “The
Drucker workshop stimulates the leaders in
the room to recognize opportunities for
innovation and entrepreneurship in their
organizations and gives them tools to seize
the moment.”
One of those leaders, Alan Oshima, a
board member of the nonprofit Hawaii
Institute for Public Affairs (HIPA), grabbed
hold of Drucker’s insight that an unexpected
failure actually represents an opportunity
for innovation.
“Faced with unexpected failure,
executives, especially in large
organizations, tend to call for more study
and more analysis,” Drucker wrote in his
1985 classic, Innovation and
Entrepreneurship. “The unexpected failure
demands that you go out, look around and
listen. Failure should always be considered
a symptom of innovative opportunity, and
taken seriously as such.”
With lessons gleaned from the
workshop, Oshima helped HIPA “research
the use of lands underlying our public
schools to generate needed revenues” in
response to a severe drop in state funding.
This innovative approach represents,
according to Oshima, a “systemic change in
how we use school lands and develop
schools for the 21st century.”
As summer approaches across
America, millions of students are now
working on final projects for their classes. If
they’re lucky, they’ll find the experience as
meaningful as the one enjoyed by Peter
Drucker’s students more than three decades
ago.
In this syllabus from Drucker’s 1974-75
Claremont Graduate University class on the
management process, he requested two
papers be handed in during the term. One of
them was a review of the students’ “own
choice out of the management literature…
dealing with the governance of institutions
and the discharge of the leadership
responsibility.”
Drucker was specific in his direction, as
he guided his students to “tell the instructor
why he chose this book as significant; what
he thinks the author tried to do; and what
he learned from the book.”
He also insisted that they move away
from merely praising, criticizing or
condemning a book, as he sought to “wean”
his students “from having ‘opinions’” and
examining “who is right.”
Rather, Drucker wanted to teach his
students to ask two key questions: “What
does the author try to do?” and “What did I
learn and how can I use it?”
This orientation, of pushing people to
turn ideas into action, was a hallmark of
Drucker’s work with corporate clients. But
clearly, Drucker wanted everyone to learn to
think this way, whether they were sitting in
the executive suite or the lecture hall.
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.
