Tools for sustaining resilient organizations: Drucker, change, crisis & leadership
… was to create happy alums? The University of the Customer showed up in a recent post in the Chronicle of Higher Education. (I made a related attempt a few months ago.) Bill Sams proposed the following mission for his mythical university of the future:
Our goal is to optimize the personal capabilities of our customers on a lifelong basis and to match those capabilities with the needs of business and society in a mutually profitable relationship. [Read more...]
The ease and speed with which an organization can tank is staggering. Equally astounding is the eventual realization of how important cultural triggers work to make it happen. A recent NYT article sets the stage for Sam Zell’s acquisition of The Tribune Company: [Read more...]
Peter Drucker said management is making knowledge effective, and I like to add “through relationships”. One definition of Social Capital is “anything that facilitates individual or collective action, generated by networks of relationships, reciprocity, trust, and social norms.” There’s overlap here somehow. Management creates and integrates social capital, and takes on its property of increasing with use – it compounds itself. [Read more...]
Why are we intrigued by the Jesuits?
The Jesuits have thrived for nearly 500 years. Surely there is a sustainability loop here somewhere. [Read more...]
A popular article at the New York Times examines the hypomania we associate with entrepreneurs such as Seth Priebatsch, founder of Scvnger (pronounced “scavenger”), who quit Princeton and now occupies a sleeping bag on a couch in his office when he’s not working 96 hours in a row. The article claims that:
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or those of you who missed it, the Economist picked up on a phenomenon in Japan worthy of notice. One of the hottest books of the year (it is said) titled What if the Female Manager of a High-School Baseball Team read Drucker’s ‘Management’ has been jumping off the shelves. (Over one million sold…)
The unlikely catalyst for this cultish enthusiasm is a fictional teenager called Minami. Like many high-school girls in Japan, she becomes the gofer for the baseball team’s male coach. Unlike many of her compatriots, she is the kind of girl, as the book says, who leaps before she looks. Horrified by the team’s lack of ambition, she sets it the goal of reaching the high-school championships. She stumbles upon Drucker’s 1973 book, and it helps her turn the rabble into a team.
Edgar Schein’s insights reminded me again of the all-consuming fire of group dynamics and how they waylay us. Schein’s classic work captures all the tacit activity that rumbles around in the background of both newly-forming and even well-established “groups”. This can mean anything from corporations to fantasy baseball aficionados.
Peter Drucker’s meaningful Outside postulates that all internal activity equals costs. Only external activity aimed at the meaningful Outside creates real results. But at the same time, without Schein’s “marker events”, “joint sensing of relief” and “shared emotional reactions” groups get nowhere. We have to slog through all that annoying stuff with other human beings to get at results. Until a group, team, start-up or corporation gets it together internally, nothing happens.
Bob Sutton picked up on a pertinent subject once again in bad is stronger than good. I was initially most amazed by the need for five times as many affirmations as negatives in a marriage or romantic relationship. I confess to being a grumpy husband at times. John Gottman wrote some good books and in at least one, demonstrated that he could predict marital success just by listening to whether spouses despised each other in a brief, video-taped record of a marriage interaction.
No, it doesn’t show up in the Fortune 500 or any other business list de jour. Peter Drucker thought the Salvation Army got the nod. At one point, the world’s largest nonprofit (supplanted by the United Way when they apparently started counting their branches differently), this group brings an entirely new dimension to effectiveness and crisis management.
Peter Drucker said that constituencies were different in business than in politics. Essentially they were single issue groups who did not always seek to make their company or organization successful, profitable or effective. (Sometimes whistleblowers start out this way and that’s not a bad thing. Why they operate and where they end up is the true test.)
Each day has 24 hours – no more, no less. If you have defined your mO you know what your priorities are. If you don’t honor your priorities you won’t reach your mO.
Peter Drucker used to say that a minimum of six straight hours of concentration were needed to generate anything worthwhile. Especially in the summers he would hole up in his home office and allegedly not venture out until at least six hours had passed. A rough draft would then move from his home in Claremont to Orlene, the most loyal secretary in the universe, who reigned at his campus office a short distance away. Rough drafts never left the hands of Orlene until they were cleaned up and Peter claimed to never let a rough draft out of his or Orlene’s sight. I tried to look at one once, and my supposedly good friend Orlene nearly perpetrated some Middle East justice on the hand that reached for the rough draft.
Leaders who metaphorically wear royal robes and query their followers might find that they were less clothed than they thought.
As soon as enough people give you enough compliments and you’re wielding more power than you’ve ever had in your life, it’s not that you become…arrogant…or become rude to people, but you get a false sense of your own importance and what you’ve accomplished. You actually think you’ve altered the course of history. Leonard0 DiCaprio[1]
If you want to lead you need a transformative crisis. This from Bill George and Andrew Maclean who write[1] about transformative leadership passages. (By the way, the lack of one may contribute to what holds many “gap leaders” in the nonperformance zone. They simply never had the tears or scars required to move on.)
But the price is high.
Alan Murray started a great conversation with his recent article titled The end of management. And of course (as he should have) he began with a Peter Drucker quote. A quick note to management professors everywhere… you’re not out of a job yet. The article may be more about the end of corporations and firms as we know them. Drucker believed that we would always have management but just as heartily endorsed organized abandonment. Murray’s really saying that it’s now the petrified Goliaths that must face this and it may be too late for some. It is fitting that A. G. Lafley is quoted at the end. Proctor and Gamble’s approach evolved from Drucker’s meaningful Outside.
If you’re not Harvard you may need to come up with a better idea… or at least a more unique one. Consider being a boutique rather than generic b-school … your meaningful Outside may be more important than you think because you cannot be all things to all students.
As a management professor, I am constantly learning that knowledge is created from the integration of theory, experience, (both individual and corporate), case studies of actual situations, informed dialogue, (integrating historical development and analysis), market activities and results, structured and intentional inquiry, and qualitative & quantitative assessment, to name a few.
“Agent provocateur” is traditionally linked to entrapment and luring others into incriminating actions. Sadly, this is how many senior leaders eventually view change agents within their organizations. “Eventually” because often the leader hired the individual for his competence in handling change and innovation, only to reconsider when change actually kicked in and gained momentum. Search committees, search firms, leaders making a hire decision, and boards all want innovation, change, fresh ideas, and excitement…until the cost is counted. The slide from change agent to agent provocateur for the hapless leader is more predictable than not.
A friend of mine says that when “change meets culture, culture wins”.
(Clara Lovett’s commentary fired a round over the B-school trenches. It made me think that we need an MBA attuned to “the rise of the rest”. Seven steps followed – here’s a discussion of the first.)
1) Reorient your worldview
Remember those grade school maps of the world where the U.S.A. showed up squarely in the middle? On my first trip to England I saw a map there with the British Isles squarely in the middle. My first thought, of course, was don’t they know that the U.S.A. is supposed to be in the middle? When I got into sailing I discovered the Southern Ocean. The world looks pretty strange with Antarctica in the middle.
(Clara Lovett’s commentary fired a round over the B-school trenches. It made me think that we need an MBA attuned to “the rise of the rest”. Seven steps followed – here’s a discussion of the fifth.)
5) Figure out functional management and apply it locally
Drucker’s “making knowledge effective” definition envisions management as a practice and a discipline. It may also be a technology, perhaps in the same sense of “intermediate” or “appropriate” technologies characterized by writers such as E. F. Schumacher.
(Clara Lovett’s commentary fired a round over the B-school trenches. It made me think that we need an MBA attuned to “the rise of the rest”. Seven steps followed – here’s a discussion of the seventh.)
7) Fear not new models
This seven-part series aimed to be an exercise in thinking about meaningful innovation that is both marketable and sustainable. This final post counts the cost of what we have to stop doing.
Peter Drucker preached organized abandonment and innovation wherever he went in his long career. The former especially required managerial courage. It is not enough just to say no. He noted that:
…the bulk of time, work, attention, and money first goes to “problems” rather than to opportunities, and, secondly, to areas where even extraordinarily successful performance will have minimum impact on results.
At a certain point in any leadership career, the executive reaches the gap. Similar to mountain climbing without the right equipment, it is an unbridgeable crevasse. All the natural gifts, resources, college networks, family connections, native intellect, personal cleverness or even ability to manipulate and control, heretofore available and applicable, are not enough. The leader simply can no longer produce the same results in an organization which has evolved beyond current competences.
The selling of education is a conundrum.
Take the case of Reed College. Colin Diver, Reed’s president, plaintively noted in the New York Times recently, “’The catering to consumer tastes — I keep trying to say, we are in the education business,’ … expressing a frustration rarely voiced publicly by college presidents.” (“College in need closes a door to needy students”, 10 June 2009).
Conversations with Peter Drucker
November 11, 2005
Today, my friend Peter Drucker died. That thousands of other men and women around the world can say the same thing is a testament to his character and his reach, over time and across cultures.
creating community crisis capacity
