What Would Drucker Do Now?: Solutions to Today's Toughest Challenges from the Father of Modern Management

by Rick Wartzman

Overview

An in-depth look at today’s most pressing business issues through the eyes of Peter Drucker—the father of modern management

“Channeling Peter Drucker to tackle some of this century’s most difficult topics, What Would Drucker Do Now? is a veritable treasure trove of fascinating reading. Drucker’s insights were nothing short of remarkable, and Rick Wartzman pays high tribute to that fact while adding a few of his own.”
—Marshall Goldsmith, author of the New York Times bestsellers MOJO And What Got You Here Won’t Get You There

“Rick Wartzman has accomplished what I didn’t think was possible: a tapestry of ideas drawn from Wartzman’s observations and personal experiences, woven together with the wisdom of the most important management thinker of this or any other age.”
—Warren Bennis, Distinguished Professor of Management, the University of Southern California, and author of the recently published Still Surprised: A Memoir of a Life in Leadership

“Peter Drucker’s thinking has had an enduring impact on consumer-driven companies like Macy’s. . . . [What Would Drucker Do Now?] serves as a compendium of the very best ideas that can help all of our companies win in a highly competitive marketplace for products, services, and customer experiences.”
—Terry Lundgren, Chairman, President, and CEO, Macy’s Inc.

“This collection of essays . . . will broaden you as a manager, a leader, and as a human being. . . . Rick Wartzman has done the world a great service by collecting the most incisive observations of a beautiful mind and linking them to problems that face leaders and organizations everywhere.”
—Brian Walker, President and CEO, Herman Miller, Inc.

“If Peter Drucker is the master, Rick Wartzman is the prized pupil. Drucker would be delighted to see his theories applied in such a cogent, thoughtful fashion.”
—Jim Weddle, Managing Partner, Edward Jones, and consulting client of Peter Drucker

About the Book:

As technology, globalization, and business innovation advance at breakneck speed, the question “What would Drucker do now?” becomes more relevant by the day. More than anyone of his time, Peter Drucker understood how the individual, the organization, and society are interrelated. And no one better recognized and articulated the challenges facing all three—or came up with more practical solutions to those challenges.

Since 2007, the Drucker Institute’s executive director, Rick Wartzman, has been asking what Drucker would do on a regular basis— in his popular online column for Bloomberg Businessweek. In each piece, Wartzman introduces a current issue and provides a view of it through the eyes of Peter Drucker, based on his deep knowledge of Drucker’s ideas and ideals.

What Would Drucker Do Now? culls Wartzman’s best, most timely columns into a single volume, offering a perspective on business and society you won’t find anywhere else. Featuring more than 80 articles, the book is organized into seven thematic sections:

• Management as a Discipline
• The Practice of Management
• Management Challenges for the Twenty-First Century
• On Wall Street and Finance
• On Values and Responsibility
• The Public and Social Sectors
• Art, Music, and Sports

Covering everything from the federal bailout of GM and the scandal at Goldman Sachs to the roles religion and race relations play in a well-functioning society, What Would Drucker Do Now? explores a range of subjects as broad as Drucker’s remarkable mind. Wartzman provides a smart, original, and provocative look at a world being buffeted by change and in which all organizations—private, public, and nonprofit—are searching for answers. What would Drucker do now, indeed?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780071763110
Publisher:	McGraw Hill LLC
Publication date:	09/09/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Rick Wartzman is the executive director of Claremont Graduate University’s Drucker Institute, an organization that advances the teachings of Peter F. Drucker with the aim of bettering society by stimulating effective management and responsible leadership. A former reporter and editor at the Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times, he is a columnist for Bloomberg Businessweek online and the editor of The Drucker Lectures: Essential Lessons on Management, Society, and Economy.

Read an Excerpt

What Would Drucker Do Now?

Solutions to Today's Toughest Challenges from the Father of Modern Management

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By Rick Wartzman

The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

Copyright © 2012The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-07-176311-0

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Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Management as a Discipline

Peter Drucker: Timeless, Ubiquitous

A few Sundays ago, I was sitting in my home office, working on an outside writing project—a historical narrative that has nothing to do with my day job as director of the Drucker Institute. The think tank's mission is to advance the teachings of the late Peter Drucker, the man widely hailed as "the father of modern management."

My stack of reading this day included a 1939 article from The Nation magazine that explored a long-forgotten pension scheme, popularly known as Ham and Eggs, which failed twice at the ballot box in Depression-era California. I was breezing right along—that is, until I got to the penultimate sentence, which contained these six words: "as Peter Drucker has pointed out." I shook my head, burst out laughing, and raced downstairs to tell my wife about my serendipitous discovery. "Geez," I said, "this guy's following me everywhere."

In the weeks since, though, what has struck me as most remarkable is not that I stumbled upon Drucker in a nearly 70-year-old magazine story. It is that hardly a week passes when a major publication somewhere in the world doesn't invoke him in the very same manner: "as Peter Drucker has said," "as Peter Drucker has pointed out."

The Big Idea

How many people can you name whose ideas—and ideals—were being discussed in 1939, in 1969, in 1999, and will be, undoubtedly, in 2039? Likewise, how many people can you cite whose counsel was requested and (to varying degrees) followed by both General Electric Chief Executive Jack Welch and United Farm Workers leader Cesar Chavez? How many get credit for inspiring an organization such as the Girl Scouts while also helping guide a financial giant like Edward Jones?

Drucker's extraordinary staying power and his wide reach speak to several factors: the depth and breadth of his insights, an uncanny ability to anticipate the future, and a prose style that is as clear as mountain water.

But perhaps most of all, he remains highly relevant two years after his death at age 95 because he reminded us again and again that responsible management is not about buzzwords. It's not about fads. Ultimately, it is not even about developing new products or fattening the bottom line (although he believed those things are important).

Rather, it is about far more fundamental tenets—a philosophy that grew directly out of Drucker's experience as a young writer who had witnessed the rise of Nazi Germany (which in the early 1930s banned and burned the Austria native's work).

Drucker wrote that management, at its core, "deals with people, their values, their growth and development—and this makes it a humanity. So does its concern with, and impact on, social structure and the community. Indeed, as everyone has learned who ... has been working with managers of all kinds of institutions for long years, management is deeply involved in moral concerns—the nature of man, good, and evil."

Every couple of weeks, this column will endeavor to tie Drucker's teachings to events in the news. It will also, from time to time, feature the latest thinking of scholars and practitioners who have been strongly influenced by Drucker. There is no shortage of these folks around, from Procter & Gamble Chairman and Chief Executive A.G. Lafley to bestselling author Jim Collins, who has said that his book Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies might well have been called "Drucker Was Right."

"What Would Peter Say?"

I am neither presumptuous nor foolish enough to suggest that I can possibly write with Drucker's prescience or perspicacity. That's not the intent of this column. All that any of us can do is simply ask, "What would Peter say?" and then try to connect the dots between his body of work and some of the issues making headlines now: the mortgage industry meltdown, thorny questions about globalization, immigration and income inequality, the blurring of nonprofits and profit-making enterprises in the social sector, the government's handling of a disaster like Hurricane Katrina.

Fortunately, there is a vast amount to draw from. Drucker wrote 39 books and countless articles.

He didn't always hit the mark and was occasionally criticized for being loose with the facts. But many of the concepts that Drucker introduced in the 1940s, '50s, '60s, and beyond have been built into the DNA of the world's top companies and embraced as second nature by a generation of social entrepreneurs. Among them: "There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer." "The business enterprise has two—and only these two—basic functions: marketing and innovation." "The shift from manual workers who do as they are being told—either by the task or by the boss—to knowledge workers who have to manage themselves profoundly challenges social structure." "Innovation and entrepreneurship are ... needed in society as much as in the economy, in public-service institutions as much as in businesses."

These are but a few of his principles, and they lead to what could be called the Drucker Paradox. His imprint is everywhere, so much so that his contribution has become, in many ways, imperceptible. Yet, at the same time, there are lots of people in business, government, and the nonprofit realm who forsake his wisdom each and every day. The need for effective management and ethical leadership—the need for Peter Drucker—has never been more pressing.

September 13, 2007

Muhammad Yunus: The Unlikely Disciple

There is no shortage of people who exemplify Peter Drucker's principles and practices—a multitude of middle managers and top executives responsible for many millions, if not billions, of dollars in economic activity. Yet the most Drucker-like of all may well be a man who launched his enterprise with a series of transactions totaling 27 bucks.

Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, who pioneered the concept of microcredit—providing the poorest of the poor with tiny loans to start their own moneymaking ventures—is promoting a new idea these days. He calls it "social business," and in his just-released book, Creating a World Without Poverty, he contends that it promises to relegate destitution across the globe to where it belongs: inside a museum.

His notion is to foster a whole class of companies capable of competing in the marketplace but whose primary aim is to meet a clear social need, not to maximize profits.

These firms are meant to earn money. But they pay no dividends. Instead, explains Yunus, "any profit stays in the business—to finance expansion, to create products or services, and to do more good for the world." (Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates recently shared a somewhat similar, though not identical, vision in Davos, Switzerland, with his plea for "creative capitalism.")

And what might Drucker have made of all this?

Any business, he asserted in Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, "exists for the sake of society." In The Effective Executive, he added: "An organization is not like an animal, an end in itself, and successful by the mere act of perpetuating the species. An organization is an organ of society and fulfills itself by the contribution it makes to the outside environment."

No Political Boxes

This is not to say Drucker pushed for corporations to focus specifically on the needs of the indigent as Yunus has. But I think he would have greatly appreciated Yunus' model, for it is an overt exp
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Excerpted from What Would Drucker Do Now? by Rick Wartzman. Copyright © 2012 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.. Excerpted by permission of The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Foreword....................          

Preface....................          

1 Management as a Discipline....................          

2 The Practice of Management....................          

3 Management Challenges for the Twenty-First Century......          

4 On Wall Street and Finance....................          

5 On Values and Responsibility....................          

6 The Public and Social Sectors....................          

7 Art, Music, and Sports....................          

Index....................