The following are the Core Values that should be our trademark as a Western institution of higher learning in Kazakhstan, approved by the Board of Trustees at a Nov. 20, 2009 meeting.

We value the well-being of our students, faculty, and staff.

We encourage personal and professional development in an environment of collegiality and trust.

We value quality in our education programs and research activities.

We value the holistic development of our students, instilling in them a questioning spirit and the ability and desire to learn throughout life.

We value our responsibility to develop the future leaders of society who will embrace the highest ethical standards.

We value the creation, application, and dissemination of knowledge in a culture which fully supports the freedom of inquiry and speech.

We value fairness and integrity and will not tolerate favoritism, nepotism or corruption.

We value open, honest communications and transparent and accountable decision-making.  

We value partnerships with our community, including the parents of our students, business, government, and non-government organizations, within The Republic of Kazakhstan and throughout the world.

We value the high reputation of our Institute in the Republic of Kazakhstan and beyond, and also its important contribution to the growth of society

We value all people both within and outside our organization, regardless
of their nationality, religion, gender or other factors not related to the purposes of the Institution.

 Here are some good leadership quotes I found off the Internet, applies to here or anywhere, I suppose.

James MacGregor Burns – “Leadership is one of the most observed and least understood phenomena on earth.”

 ”Leadership is the ability to establish standards and manage a creative climate where people are self-motivated toward the mastery of long term constructive goals, in a participatory environment of mutual  respect, compatible with personal values.”                                         Mike Vance

 ”No institution can possibly survive if it needs geniuses or supermen to manage it. It must be organized in such a way as to be able to get along under a leadership composed of average human beings.”                                                                                                                            Peter Drucker

 ”Leadership is not magnetic personality, that can just as well be a glib tongue. It is not “making friends and influencing people”, that is flattery. Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to higher sights, the raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.”  Peter F. Drucker

“You do not lead by hitting people over the head — that’s assault, not leadership.”  Dwight D. Eisenhower

“A leader is best when people barely know he exists, not so good when people obey and acclaim him, worst when they despise him. But of a good leader, who talks little, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say, ‘We did this ourselves.’”                                                     Lao-Tse

 Dwight D. Eisenhower:  “Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.”

 Thomas Fulera: “If your actions inspire other people to dream more, to study more, to do more and to become better, then you are a leader.”

“High sentiments always win in the end, The leaders who offer blood, toil, tears and sweat always get more out of their followers than those who offer safety and a good time. When it comes to the pinch, human beings are                                                                             George Orwell

Winston Churchill: “Before you can inspire with emotion, you must be swamped with it yourself.  Before you can move their tears, your own must flow.  To convince them, you must yourself believe.”

An inexpensive source of valuable knowledge for product and/or service improvement is customer complaints and customer dissatisfactions. Of course, solving customer complaints or dissatisfactions prevents or reduces loss of customers.

Some customer dissatisfactions are so mild that the customer herself may not be aware of them. Ask a customer for feedback during the initial stages of use; long afterwards, she would have adjusted to the product and forgotten her mild dissatisfaction. Ask “What feature(s) of the product do you like least? Why?” Different features of a product produces different value added for the average customer; least value-adding features offer the best opportunities for product improvement. Non-value adding features could be removed. Two different product features appealing to different customer segments suggest creating two versions of the product that are customized (i.e. more value adding for both) to their respective segments.

Observe if the customer makes improvisations (which can be unconscious) in the product or how she uses it. These little customer improvisations are cues that she perceives a gap in the product’s usefulness.

A bakery company in Japan involves customers (housewives) during all stages of their R&D, from the evolution of the product idea to exploring and testing various options and on to product launching. Of course, if you are one of these housewives it would be natural and expected that you personally promote the product to other customers after product launching!

An indication that a company sees and captures the value of customers’ feedbacks for its R&D is when the R&D unit and the sales or after-sales services (or other frontline or customer-facing unit) is under the same company executive. Otherwise, the flow of feedback information from frontline units to the R&D unit is either absent or inefficient. These two seemingly unrelated departments are actually crucial for value creation by the company. Management guru Peter Drucker said, “Marketing and innovation produce results. All the rest are costs.”

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For my money, the best bang for the buck and wisdom per word on marketing, management and business comes from Peter Drucker.  Born in Vienna in 1909, Peter wrote 39 books by the time he left us in 2005.  He was frequently sought after by the Harvard Business Review, The Economist and the Atlantic Monthly. 

For the 12 days of Christmas, here are a dozen pieces of sage advice from Peter. 

1. Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.
2. Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action.
3. Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes.
4. Management by objective works – if you know the objectives. Ninety percent of the time you don’t.
5. Objectives are not fate; they are direction. They are not commands; they are commitments. They do not determine the future; they are means to mobilize the resources and energies of the business for the making of the future.
6. Most discussions of decision-making assume that only senior executives make decisions or that only senior executives’ decisions matter. This is a dangerous mistake.
7. People who don’t take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year. People who do take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year.
8. Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.
9. The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.
10. The purpose of a business is to create and keep customers.
11. There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.
12. The only thing we know about the future is that it will be different.

Peter’s wisdom is never out of season.  For information about the Drucker Institute, go to http://www.druckerinstitute.com/

Other HR bloggers at this time of year are making their predictions for 2010.  I’m not going to even attempt that one!  But I will document for you my hopes and dreams for HR for 2010.  I look forward to revisiting this list next December and seeing how far we’ve come! 

1.  HR understands that social networking has become a must do to survive.  It will no longer lock it down or police it.  It will work within the new world, accept it for what it is and most importantly, take advantage of it.  This doesn’t mean that everyone should sign up for Twitter!  Instead, we should consider the options available and choose what makes sense for the organization. 

2.  More industries and organizations give their shareholders or stakeholders a “say on pay”, giving them information on executive pay.  It’ll open up discussions and build transparency.  On December 11th, the U.S. passed say on pay legislation for the financial industry.  But the financial industry in Canada realized that they didn’t need to wait for the law to step in to do the right thing.  Management guru Peter Drucker would agree:  revamping exec comp is good for the organization and society.  

3.  Companies up their investment in employee learning and development.  Everyone is screaming for the need to increase productivity.  Investing in improving literacy and providing employees with skills to do their jobs better has a better ROI than buying a new computer.  

4.  Derogatory comments about Gen X, Y or Z stops.  This is a form of ageism and should go the way of sexism, racism and other ‘isms.  Let’s talk about how generations differ and how to maximize value through them, much in the same way we talk about any other group in our organization (e.g. women, visible minorities, etc.).  I’m not sure if people who call Gen X “entitled” realize that they have just offended me….  

5.  HR increases its knowledge on metrics and dedicates some resources to it.  I get it – your systems are cranky, your data is garbage, you don’t have the budget… I’ll tell you a secret:  start anyways and you’ll get better at everything else along the way.  Isn’t that how we start anything for the first time anyways? 

6.  As the economy gets better, organizations bring back the Christmas party, merit increases and focus on engagement.  Cut backs shouldn’t be the new status quo to maximize profits but we certainly can get more efficient at how we manage these things.  

7.  Everyone reads What Matters Now.  Shout out to Dalell Amed who shared this ebook with me using another social web took, LinkedIn.  Within 24 hours, I received 3 copies of this book thanks to our profession’s willingness to share knowledge.  If you still don’t quite understand the value of social networking, this is how it works folks.  

8.  HR pros start an email chain on the blog post “18 Breakthrough Ideas for HR Success in 2010″  along with these Holiday Eating Tips. 

Thanks for following my blog this year, for your encouragement, compliments and most importantly for joining in on the conversation.  Happy Holidays! 

Take a break, you hard worker you, and find Waldo! (click on the pic to make it larger!)

When we look back to the 20th Century and reflect on great leaders, whether leading nations, organizations or social movements, there’s a tendency to produce a list with a preponderance of male names. However, when one attempts to create a list of who were the great management thinkers during this period, it becomes even more skewed towards males. Names like the late Peter Drucker, John Kotter, Peter Senge, John Garner, James MacGregor Burns, Robert Greenleaf, Henry Mintzberg and Warren Bennis typically come to mind. But so, too, do names like Rosebeth Moss Kanter, Sally Helgesen and Margaret Wheatley.

The irony behind this is that the individual who is recognized as what Peter Drucker called “The Prophet of Management” was a woman: Mary Parker-Follet, born in 1868 and died in 1933. Because of her foresight and innovative thinking, the effects of which are still being examined today, Follett may rightly be called the Mother of Modern Management.

Unfortunately, Follett’s writings and numerous lectures, were set aside for several decades. It was in the 1990s when her writings and concepts were reinvigorated. I was introduced to her work by my advisor for my Master’s leadership thesis in the late nineties. I was amazed that someone 60-70 years previously was urging such concepts as shared (participative) leadership, constructive conflict resolution through what was called “integration,” and “power-with” opposed to “power-over.”

Let’s hear a few passages from some of Follett’s writings and lectures. Once you read them, reflect on their relevance to today, especially whether her concepts are being practiced.

1949: (Freedom & coordination: Lectures in Business Organization)

“Some writers tell us that the leader should represent the accumulation and knowledge and experience of his particular group, but I think he should go far beyond this. It is true that the executive learns from everyone around him, but it is also true that he is far more than the depository where the wisdom of the group collects.

When leadership rises to genius it has the power of transforming, of transforming experience into power. And that is what experience is for, to be made into power. The great leader creates as well as directs power. The essence of leadership is to create control, and that is what the world needs today, control of small situations or of our world situation.

I have said that the leader must understand the situation, must see it as a whole, must see the inter-relationships of all the parts. He must do more than this. He must see the evolving situation….His wisdom, his judgement, is used, not on a situation that is stationary, but on one that is changing all the time.”

1925: (Paper first delivered to Bureau of Personnel Administration conference)

“There are three ways of dealing with conflict: domination, compromise and integration. Domination…is a victory of one side over the other. This is the easiest way of dealing with conflict, but not usually successful in the long run, as we can see what has happened since the War.

The second way… [is] compromise, we understand well, for it is the way we settle most of our controversies; each side gives up a little in order to have peace…or that the activity that has been interrupted by the conflict may go on. Compromise is the basis of trade union tactics….But I certainly ought not to imply that compromise is peculiarly a trade union method….

There is a way beginning now to be recognized: …when two desires are integrated, that means that a solution has been found in which both desires have found a place, that neither side has to sacrifice anything.”

Follett gives several examples of how to find integrative solutions to problems. For example, she uses a personal problem she had one day at the library. Seated in the same room with a man who wanted the window open for fresh air, Follett objected because she didn’t want cold air blowing on her. The integrative solution? They opened a window in the adjacent room. The man got his fresh air while Follett didn’t get a draft.

So here are three examples for you to find integrative solutions:

Case #1: Mr. Tuna

You work in a typical cubicle farm. Your neighbor enjoys eating tuna fish sandwiches several days a week. You have mentioned on a few occasions that the smell is nauseating, but he’s not getting the message. What would be an integrative solution in this case?

Case #2: Ragtime Blues

You live in a condo high-rise. During the early evening, the person next door pounds out ragtime blues on her piano. She’s not breaking any bylaws or condo policy. What is the integrative solution?

Case #3: He Shoots, He Scores!

You love your neighborhood where you’ve lived for many years. But there’s problem. Every fall, the kids set up their nets on your cul de sac and play ball hockey for the next five months. You love your BMW and fringe every time you hear the slap of a stick. What’s the integrative solution with these youngsters?

Be sure to post your solutions for others to see and comment on. And sure, include any humorous solutions. If we get enough, we’ll have a contest to vote for the best one.

There you have it, folks, a few illuminating bits from an amazing woman who was far ahead of her time. What’s unfortunate is that despite so much pain and suffering through the rest of the 20th Century after Follett’s death, and during the first decade of the 21st Century, we don’t as a society seem to have learned much. Conflict in the workplace and communities is worse, organized labor and management continue to grab for one another’s throat, and municipal politics is as nasty as ever.

When it comes to the practice of leadership, the heroic mindset still prevails: “Do as I say, not as I do!” Role modeling is in short supply. Exceptional leadership is, as the saying goes, scarce as hens’ teeth.

We would all do well to take some time during the Christmas break to reflect on how each of us lives our own leadership. I detest New Year’s resolutions. But to assist you on your way to become a more effective leader, whether at work, at home or in your community, I invite you to read my new e-book: Becoming a Holistic Leader: Strategies for Successful Leadership Using a Principle-Based Approach.

You can download it now for free from my website: Leadership World Connect.com

It’s my Christmas gift to you.

Merry Christmas!

“People who don’t take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year. People who do take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year.” Peter Drucker

Are you taking enough risk?

Also, on a related note, have you read enough Peter Drucker? The book The Effective Executive is a good introduction.

As a student and practitioner of organizational management, my bookshelf is lined with books by Peter Drucker, a pioneer in social and management theory and prolific writer.

One of my favorite Drucker quotes is: “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.”

Another great Drucker passage which I send to many of my clients before we embark on strategic planning is the following (emphasis added):

What is the managers job? It is to direct the resources and the efforts of the business toward opportunities for economically significant results. This sounds trite — and it is. But every analysis of actual allocation of resources and efforts in business that I have ever seen or made showed clearly 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 minimal impact on results.

What is the major problem? It is fundamentally the confusion between effectiveness and efficiency that stands between doing the right things and doing things right. There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all. Yet our tools especially our accounting concepts and detail focus on efficiency. What we need is (1) a way to identify the areas of effectiveness (of possible significant results), and (2) a method for concentrating on them.

Another words, stop trying to do better what you shouldn’t be doing at all.

In any organization and in our own lives, we all spend too much time and energy on things that are not helping us accomplish what we really want to achieve. Too often we ask what more should we be doing. But the question really  is, what should we stop doing.

I can’t wait for 2009 to be over. I can only think of one other year (early 20s: bad marriage, even worse divorce) that was as stressful, distressing, scary and plain old difficult as this one has been.  Over the course of the year, I extricated myself from real estate debacles, downsized and moved, supported my husband through six months of back pain and subsequent surgery, closed one business and started another and developed a mean, yet intermittent, case of acid reflux along the way. As I said, I’m ready to close the books on this year.

Even so, through the grace of friends and family, and with gratitude for the good things I did have in my life, I managed to turn 2009 into an opportunity to look with fresh eyes at where I was in my life, what I wanted to create next and how I was going to get there. Sometimes productivity is not about getting more done in less time, but taking the time to step back and reflect so that more satisfaction can be gained in the long run. From this vantage point, I can see that that was my productivity lesson for 2009.

So it was with great interest that I read about Bruce Rosenstein’s new book “Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life.” This past November marked 100 years since the birth of management guru Peter Drucker. While millions worldwide celebrated Drucker as the “father of modern management,” Rosenstein says that he was a big proponent of self-management as well. “Surprisingly, most people are not as familiar with Drucker’s views on personal development — or self-management — which are as profound as his teaching on organizations,” says Rosenstein.

Drucker’s central message on self-management, according to Rosenstein, can be summed up in one sentence: Get a life — a “total life” with diverse interests, relationships and pursuits. “This way, when you have a setback at work — such as losing your job or being forced to reinvent yourself — you can soften the blow with other areas of strength and support,” says Rosenstein. I know just what he means.

A former business writer and librarian at USA Today, Rosenstein has studied, interviewed and written about Drucker for more than two decades. He also conducted one of the last interviews Drucker gave, seven months before his death at 95.

Here, in a nutshell, is a Drucker-inspired compass to managing your life and career with as much satisfaction and productivity as possible in a 21st century full of new challenges and opportunities:

• Practice self-development. Think about your life, both as it is now and where you’d like it to go. Consider not just your work as a freelancer, full-time employee or part-time telecommuter, but also your life outside of work — family, friends, interests, activities and pursuits. Assess what’s working, what’s not and what you might want to add or subtract to create more satisfaction and fulfillment. Ask yourself: “Am I developing and nourishing a multidimensional human being?”
• Identify and develop your unique strengths. Drucker said that, in his experience, few people could articulate their areas of strength. Consider what’s unique about what you do, and in what areas you excel and contribute the most, both at work and outside of work. Are you the person your coworkers depend on to settle disputes? Can your clients always count on you to come through in a tight spot? Focus on those strengths — your own core competencies — and find new ways to cultivate and cherish them. Ask yourself: “Am I leveraging my strengths, at work and outside of work?”
• Create a parallel or second career. One unique idea Drucker advocated was creating a “parallel career” in areas such as teaching, writing or working in nonprofit organizations. He also encouraged developing a second career, often by doing similar work in a significantly different setting. A web worker, for instance, might move from working for a traditional high-tech company to a non-profit one that fits with his or her passions. While still in your main job, start thinking about your own possibilities for a parallel or second career. Consider how they match your values, experience and education and what shifts you might need to make in your life to support such changes. Ask yourself: “Am I preparing for the future?”
• Exercise your generosity. Sharing your time and talents in areas such as volunteerism, social entrepreneurship and mentoring not only provide opportunities to contribute, but also offer personal benefits, from broadening and deepening your life experience to expanding your circle of friends and colleagues. Think about what happens outside your workplace — in other industries, professions and walks of life — and consider ways you can exercise your own generosity. Ask yourself: “Am I making a difference in the world?”
• Teaching and learning. Drucker believed that knowledgeable workers must start learning during their formal schooling and then never stop throughout their lives. Consider your own priorities for learning, as well as how you learn best — taking classes, reading articles and books, asking or observing others, etc. Ask yourself: “Am I still learning?”

As you get ready to say goodbye to 2009 and welcome 2010, set aside some time in between cups of eggnog lattés and last minute trips to the mall to sit and reflect on the year you’ve had, the year coming up and how the productive, creative and reflective you can move forward into the “total life” Drucker describes.

What steps will you take to create a “total life” in 2010?

An established company which, in an age demanding innovation, is not able to innovate, is doomed to decline and extinction.

- Peter Drucker

The Wisdom of Peter Drucker from A to Z

Known widely as the father of management, Peter Drucker formulated many concepts about business that we now take for granted. On the 100th anniversary of his birth, we take a look at Drucker’s contributions, from A to Z. 

By Leigh Buchanan |  Nov 19, 2009

Peter Drucker was known to gently chide ambitious acolytes to replace their pursuit of success with the pursuit of contribution. Certainly few people contributed as much to Twentieth Century business, social, and political thought as Drucker, who was born 100 years ago – on November 19, 1909 – in a suburb of Vienna. 

Known widely as the father of management, Drucker immigrated to the United States in 1937. In a career that produced 39 books, as well as lectures, classes, consultations, and even movies, Drucker anatomized the functioning (and dysfunctioning) of companies. It would be easier to list the ideas he didn’t promulgate in some form than those he did. (As far as we know he never weighed in on Secret Santa or pets in the workplace.) Much of the business lexicon bruited about in offices – from “knowledge worker” to “management by objective” – can be traced to Druckerian coinage. For decades harried CEOs have restructured their work lives based on Drucker’s almost zen insights about efficiency and time management. His pronouncements on customers, marketing, and profitability deserve to be framed and hung in every corner office to remind business leaders where their priorities should lie.

Encountering Drucker for the first time, readers may dismiss as obvious his observations on subjects like motivating workers and encouraging innovation. But such observations were far from obvious when Drucker first made them; and if they seem so now it is because his wisdom and clarity compelled so many companies to act as he advised. “What I find is that whenever I think I have got a really creative idea, if I go back [to] Peter’s books I always find he already said it first,” said One-Minute Manager author Ken Blanchard during a celebration of the centary at Claremont University’s Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management. Drucker had the ears of CEOs, heads of state, and major philanthropists. Corporate titans likeGeneral Electric and Toyota were swayed by his ideas. “Drucker gave us the language, the metaphor, the lens, the understanding of the role of management as the critical function,” said Good to Great author Jim Collins at theClaremont event. 

In honor of the centenary, we have compiled an alphabetical list of some people, places, and concepts drawn from the life and works of Drucker. 

Abandonment: Jim Collins earns applause when he lectures about his “stop doing” list. Jack Welch gained fame for shedding businesses in which General Electric wasn’t first or second. But it was Drucker who first suggested that choosing what not to do was a decision as strategic as its opposite. Drucker’s theory of “purposeful abandonment” exhorted business leaders to quickly sever projects, policies and processes that had outlived their usefulness. “The first step in a growth policy is not to decide where and how to grow,” he told author Jeffrey Krames in 2003. “It is to decide what to abandon. In order to grow, a business must have a systematic policy to get rid of the outgrown, the obsolete, the unproductive.” 

Bystander: Though he bestrode the management world like a Colossus, Drucker was less assuming than many of today’s mega-wattage gurus. An early advocate of servant leadership, he both valued and practiced humility, describing himself as a “bystander” who is “on the stage but not part of the action.” Even his quasi-autobiography,Adventures of a Bystander, refracts Drucker’s life through the stories of people he had known, such as Sigmund Freud and Henry Luce. 

Customers: Having trouble formulating a mission statement? Let Drucker boil it down for you: “The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer,” he argued. And: “What does our customer find valuable?” is the most important question companies can ask themselves. This focus helped reorient marketing away from advertising and onto a higher plane. 

Decentralization: Little fish learn to be big fish in little ponds. Drucker favored decentralized organizations because they create small pools in which employees gain satisfaction by witnessing the fruits of their efforts, and nascent leaders can make mistakes without bringing down the business. When Drucker laid out these ideas in the mid-1940s, the command-and-controllers who dominated corporations were not amused. Today, of course, “stovepipe” organizations – those that remain – are widely maligned for their failure to make the most of human and information resources. 

Effectiveness: Perhaps the most revelatory insight in the history of time management tore the bottom out of Frederick Taylor’s time-and-motion studies: “Efficiency is doing things right,” Drucker wrote in The Effective Executive. Effectiveness is doing the right things.” What’s true for individual managers is also true for organizations, which often squander time and resources trying to improve processes for products not worth producing. The solution? See “abandonment,” above. 

Future: Drucker dismissed attempts to label him a “futurist,” insisting that “the best way to predict the future is to create it” and “the only thing we know about the future is that it will be different.” Still, his forecasting tended to be spot-on. Among other things, he anticipated the rise of Japan, the importance of computers, and the backlash against executive pay. His method was to study significant events that had already occurred and had predictable effects going forward. Or to use Drucker’s elegant oxymoron: “the future that has already happened.” 

General Motors: Drucker’s Concept of the Corporation (1945) was arguably the first drop in what would become a deluge of organizational and management studies. The corporation in question was GM, to which Drucker was given the kind of access for which today’s business scholars would sell their grandmas up the river. Drucker’s conclusions about corporate structure and management style and their effect on worker productivity and morale were enormously influential – although they so annoyed then-CEO Alfred Sloan, that he pretended the book didn’t exist. 

Hitler: Drucker’s first book, The End of Economic Man, was a study not of management but of totalitarianism. Living in Germany during Hitler’s rise (two pamphlets he wrote – one praising a German-Jewish philosopher and one roundly condemning the National Socialists – were banned and burned by the Nazis), Drucker was achingly aware of the worst government and society could dish out. His later writing can be interpreted as a lifelong quest for functional, principled institutions. 

Innovation: Thomas Edison would get no pushback from Drucker on his 1 percent inspiration-99-percent-perspiration formula. Drucker believed that innovation – “the specific function of entrepreneurship” – must be methodically ferreted out, and he posited seven likely places to find it: in unexpected occurrences, incongruities, process needs, new knowledge, demographics, perceptions, and changes in industries and markets. The crucial characteristic of innovators is focus. Even Thomas Edison, Drucker pointed out, “worked only in the electrical field.” 

Japan: The Japanese found much to love about Drucker in the 1960s, as industrial giants like Toyota embraced his theories on the primacy of employees and ideas about marketing – a comparably nascent discipline there. The admiration was mutual, with Drucker praising such Japanese practices as lifetime employment (though he later conceded the need for greater flexibility) and deliberative decision-making followed by quick action. Among Drucker’s great passions was Japanese art, which he both collected and lectured on extensively. 

Knowledge workers: The term “knowledge management” has that PC era smell. But almost 20 years before the founding of Microsoft, Drucker coined the term “knowledge worker” to describe the growing cadre of employees who labored with their brains rather than their hands. Drucker explained that knowledge workers require a new style of management that treats them more as volunteers or partners than as subordinates. He predicted correctly that the ability of leaders to motivate these founts of productivity – “the most valuable asset of a 21^st century institution” – would become a cornerstone of competitive advantage. 

Lifelong learning: Another –  Peter Senge – popularized the concept of “learning organizations” in the 1980s. But learning organizations are predicated on learning individuals. Drucker called teaching people how to learn “the most pressing task” for managers, given the perpetual expansion of skills and knowledge that are products of the information economy. He personally eschewed the designation “guru” – which suggests one who counsels–casting himself rather as a student. True to form, Drucker every year assigned himself a topic about which he knew nothing and made it the subject of intense study. 

Marketing: Drucker was born in 1909, the same year that Henry Ford famously declared, “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.” Drucker’s theories of marketing – the “distinguishing, unique function of business” – amount to an extended refutation of that attitude. The aim of marketing, in Drucker’s view, was to “know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself.” Innovation, which Drucker considered the other basic function of business, is responsible for the creation of those self-selling products. 

Non-profits: What’s better than a run on Thin Mints? Being declared the best-run organization in America by the world’s preeminent business thinker. In 1981, Drucker bestowed that encomium on the Girl Scouts USA, one of many non-profits with which he worked closely over the years (others included the American Heart Association and The Salvation Army). Drucker was a passionate proponent of the social and economic importance of non-profits, which he deemed the “most distinguishing feature” of American society. He created a set of management principles specifically for that sector, and urged businesses to draw lessons in establishing a mission and motivating workers from the non-profit world. 

Objectives: In the daily scrum of business, employees become so focused on what they’re doing they forget why they’re doing it. And off the rails they go. In The Process of Management (1954), Drucker called this “the activity trap” and proposed “management by objective” as a way to avoid it. With MBO, employees participate in setting goals and are then evaluated on how they fulfill those goals. Managers can focus on the “what” rather than the “how.” “Management by objective works – if you know the objective,” Drucker wrote. “Ninety percent of the time you don’t.” 

Profitability: Drucker was all for profit – but not for profit maximization. He viewed healthy margins as a necessary condition for the social good of wealth creation. Yet profits are not the purpose of an organization but rather a constraint: not the reason to behave in a particular way but rather a test of whether the business is behaving appropriately. “If archangels instead of businessmen sat in the directors’ chairs, they would still have to be concerned with profitability, despite their total lack of interest in making profits.”

Questions: In effective organizations, employees know their roles. And Drucker was acutely aware of his. “My job is to ask questions,” he once informed a consulting client, according to an article in Business Week. “It’s your job to provide answers.” In this Socratic style, Drucker inspired a generation of business leaders to wax introspective about their organizations. Any journey of self-exploration, he believed, should begin with five essential questions. “What is our mission? Who is our customer? What does the customer value? What are our results? What is our plan?” 

Respect: For more than 60 years, Drucker preached that workers are assets not liabilities, and should be treated with respect. (Pick up your Daily Dilbert or watch an episode of The Office, then judge how persuasive he was.) Drucker reimagined the organization as a human community and the job of management as preparing people to perform and then getting out of their way. That attitude wasn’t just nice. Given that knowledge skills are more portable than manual ones, it was also smart. “The management of knowledge workers should be based on the assumption that the corporation needs them more than they need the corporation.” 

Schumpeter: Drucker really understood entrepreneurs, an appreciation spawned in part by the work of Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter. Schumpeter introduced the idea of creative destruction: the necessary collateral damage that occurs when entrepreneurs – whom he called “wild spirits” – breach established markets. Entrepreneurs drive progress and create wealth, Schumpeter believed, a mantra Drucker took up in his own copious writings on innovation. “The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity,” Drucker wrote. 

Time management:“Time is the scarcest resource, and unless it is managed nothing else can be managed.”In a sense, much of Drucker’s writing about effective organizations boils down to time management. If time is the insurmountable constraint, deciding how to use it becomes is the most strategic of decisions. On a more personal level, Drucker suggested managers measure how they spend their time and compare that with how they should be spending it, then make the requisite modifications. His overarching question: “What needs to be done right now for the business?” 

Universals: Drucker faulted business literature for raising performance expectations unrealistically high, demanding that managers be mathematical and creative, adept at decision-making and analysis, and in possession of excellent people skills and a firm grasp of organizational dynamics. “What seems to be wanted is universal genius, and universal genius has always been in short supply,” he observed. “The experience of the human race indicates strongly that the only person in abundant supply is the universal incompetent.” 

Vienna: Drucker grew up in a small suburb of the city named Dobling, where his parents – a government official and a doctor – hosted soirees for scientists and intellectuals. Living near the starry seat of the Hapsburg monarchy, the family was able to attract prominent economists and political philosophers like Joseph Schumpeter, Friedrich August von Hayek, and Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises, whose conversation instilled in Drucker a lifelong curiosity and interest in ideas. 

Welch: The chemical combustion that birthed “Neutron Jack” Welch was set off in a meeting with Drucker in 1981. Drucker posed two questions to Welch, who had just been named General Electric’s CEO: “If you weren’t already in this business, would you enter it today? And if not, what are you going to do about it?” Those questions inspired Welch’s dramatic restructuring of General Electric, including the elimination of many low-growth businesses and 240,000 positions. From there, Welch rebuilt GE into a hugely successful, market-leading corporation with an employee-development program ambitious enough even for Drucker. 

X-ray: How do you know when it’s time for the next Next New Thing? In Managing for Results (1964) Drucker introduced the concept of a “business x-ray” – a tool for determining innovation strategies. Companies use the x-ray to evaluate the life cycles of their existing offerings. They then identify the gap between those offerings’ expected future performance and their own larger goals. Finally, they fill that gap with–what else?–innovation. “The entrepreneurial achievement must be large enough to fill that gap and timely enough to fill it before the old becomes obsolescent,” Drucker wrote. 

Yardsticks: With his emphasis on results, Drucker was bullish on metrics. But he worried that managers often measure the wrong things (for example, things unrelated to the leader’s desired outcome) or that they measure too much, or that they express their measurements in the wrong way. When evaluating management effectiveness, he touted one metric (or “yardstick” as he often it) above others. That yardstick: productivity, which Drucker defined as “the degree to which resources are utilized and their yield.” 

Zen: In 1998, when the writer Harriet Rubin interviewed Drucker at his home for Inc., he showed her this passage from a book on Japanese art: “The Zen-inspired painter seeks the ‘truth’ of a landscape, like that of religion, in sudden enlightenment. This allows no time for careful detailed draftsmanship. After long contemplation, he is expected to be able to seize inner truth in a swordlike stroke of the brush….” Similarly, Drucker achieved enlightenment through quiet observation, waiting patiently until he saw an idea whole, then rendering universal truth in the swift space of a sentence. Thus was the essence of the master. 

Copyright © 2009 Mansueto Ventures LLC. All rights reserved. Inc.com, 7 World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007-2195.

http://www.inc.com/articles/2009/11/Drucker.html

Managing in a Time of Great Change

1. The worship of high profit margins and of “premium pricing” that always creates a market for the competitor. “And high profit margins do not equal maximum profits.”

2. Mispricing a new product by charging “what the market will bear.” “This, too, creates risk-free opportunity for the competition.”

3. Cost-driven pricing. “The only thing that works is price-driven costing.”

4. Slaughtering tomorrow’s opportunity on the altar of yesterday. Drucker cites the example of IBM that committed this sin at least twice, first when forbidding sales initiatives that could threaten the sales of punch cards and years later when preventing its PC people to contact mainframe customers.

5. Feeding problems and starving opportunities. “All one can get by ‘problem solving’ is damage containment. Only opportunities produce results and growth.”

The complete article as well as 24 others are available for the first time in a single volume, Managing in a Time of Great Change, published by Harvard Business Press in 2009 as part of the centennial celebration of Drucker (November 19, 1909 – November 11, 2005).

It’s not a secret that my favorite Christmas movie is, “It’s a Wonderful Life.” I usually try to watch it 6 or 8 times every year and yes, it makes my husband crazy when I do. I love the end of the movie when George runs to the edge of town and reads the sign: You’re now entering Bedford Falls. He has “His Life” back. It may not have been what he perceived to be as the perfect life. But once he was removed from it, on the outside looking in so to speak, he knew it was the life that he really loved and wanted. Without a doubt it was the perfect life for him.

I’m sure everyone or almost everyone has seen the movie by now and we can all relate to this movie in part or as a whole. Its just a wonderful realization of what our lives and the people that we care the most about, would miss if anything were to change, or if we weren’t in the picture anymore.

I sat down and re-watched The Family Man – which I’ve seen a few dozen times as well… aka chick flick. I love movies that remind people what life could or should be if they have family to love and to love them back. It’s what we all strive for; some to the point of obsession. We all take a hard look at our lives at some point and make decisions on what to do to improve our daily lives. Each day; buy a new house or car, move to another house or school district, we clean, we decorate, we call friends and family, we share stories, we do all the mundane tasks that we are supposed to do, I’m not sure if its to impress the neighbors or to make ourselves feel happy, but we complete these tasks everyday.

But what if this was to change? What if you’re not here tomorrow to complete these mundane tasks? Whose job will it be then? Did it really matter to anyone if it were done? Did I make all the right choices? Change the bad things into good? Appreciate all the simple things that I have?

Think about all the simple things; things you put aside to complete all of your mundane daily tasks, when you could have spent that same amount of time making someone you care about or someone who cares about you, feel more alive, more needed or more important to you? Did you share a little of yourself with someone today? Make the right changes for you?

It’s almost Christmas, and it’s not about what I can afford to buy you, it’s about what will you remember about me when I’m gone? Was I trustworthy? Honest? Loving or Caring? Empathic? Did I only remember you as a name on a Birthday or Christmas card; sent once a year? Did I love to see you come by the house or called to say, “Hi?” If not, why? Did I not take the time to let you know how much you mean to me? Didn’t I show you that I care? Even in some small way? Did I tell you how much I love and appreciate you?

This Christmas, don’t just buy someone a gift; share a picture, a cup of tea or coffee, and/or some small part of yourself, with those you love. It’s after all, what they will remember the most, not the tinsel or the lavish gifts; it’s the love that went into it. So stop by or call and tell the ones you care about, that they are the thing that you treasure, the most precious gift you will receive this year. Your presence is the gift! Welcome Home and Welcome to the Family! And as my gift to you, “Enjoy your Wonderful Life!”

Trust is the conviction that the leader means what he or she says. It’s a belief in two old-fashioned qualities called consistency and integrity. Trust opens the door to change. ~ Peter Drucker

Forming a team is always awkward at first. You are all new to each other, nobody knows what anyone likes or dislikes, and you are all in the same boat trying to figure out how you can all work together.

Instead of letting people stumble upon how you operate tell them upfront! You can do this in a clear focused way using what I like to call The Drucker Exercise.

The Drucker Exercise

The Drucker Exercise is a powerful relationship building exercise to help you and your team gel at the start of a project.

By sharing the answers to four simple questions:

• what am I good at?
• how do I perform?
• what do I value?
• what contribution can be expected from me on this project

you give your team the means to figure out how best to work with you, while at the same time setting expectations around how you can best work with them.

For example, spend two minutes thinking hard about what you are world class at and what you can do better than anybody else.

Understanding your core strengths is good to two reasons. First, it raises your level of self awareness (necessary for spotting opportunities where you can really shine). And secondly, it tells others where they can expect you to excel and where you are really going shine.

The next question to ask yourself is around performance.

How you perform is giving team members a heads on where your magic comes from. Are you a morning person? Let them know. That way they won’t schedule meetings with you during your most productive hours.

If you enjoy collaborating, but occasionally require moments of solitude, let them know that too so they won’t be surprised when you grab your laptop and head down to the coffee shop for some private brain storming.

The next question has to do with your values.

Values are about what you stand for. There are stake in the ground that let’s people know what’s important to you and what you care deeply about. Letting people know what you stand for is important because it gives them insight into what they can expect from you, and better predict how you are going to act and behave.

For example, say on your last project you were perpetually being asked to cut corners, hack, and take every liberty with the code base in the name of speed. Quality was all but thrown and the window and you felt bad coming in every day knowing you weren’t going to be able to do your best work.

If quality is important to you on this project then set that expectation upfront. Let the team know you are going to stand for shoddy craftsmanship. Your code is always going to be accompanied by a suite of automated tests you won’t tolerate bugs—of any kind.

Which brings us to our last question. What can the team expect from you on this project.

This question really gets into what role(s) you can be expected to play on the project.

If your a developer with a passion for user experience, let them know that in addition to cutting high quality code you would like to participate in designing the user experience.

If you were an analyst on the last project, but are now stepping into the role of project manager, let them know they won’t be able to count on you for analysis during this project as you will have your hands full learning the ropes of project management.

Setting expectations about roles at the beginning of the project is good because if there is any confusion about who is doing what, this brings it out on the table for all to see.

Then if any expectations need to be reset (including yours) you can do it before the project begins, and avoid having to reset expectations later.

Don’t wait

You don’t have to wait for a new project to do the Drucker Exercise. You can do it right now. Yes it takes courage to share this kind of stuff with your team. But when you do the response is almost always the same: “This was most helpful. Why didn’t you tell me about this sooner.”

Of course the real power of this exercise comes from doing it as a team and sharing your thoughts with others.

For the full story behind the Drucker Exercise get a copy of the paper Managing oneself and give it the full read. You won’t be disappointed.

Joined up Management is a Very Good Idea in theory. I look forward to finding convincing examples of it working in practice

The concept has been around for some while, and still crops up regularly in business speak, particularly in the public sector. There seems little recognition that mostly this sounds like the mouthing of rhetoric. Its basic idea is that of systems thinking. This provides an explanation of organizational silos, and proposes remedies which permit improved integration of previously sealed-off knowledge packages.

One distinguished systems thinker is Russell Ackoff who is still going strong, and has been talking much sense on the subject over several decades.

Ackoff is regarded as a serious academic who may have been hindered in promoting systems theories by a distaste for the art of the guru. He likes to quote his old friend, the late Peter Drucker noting that the only reason people called him a guru was that they did not know how to spell the word “charlatan”.

Systems theory makes the essential dilemma of joined up thinking clear. You connect up some sub-systems more strongly at the expense of others. That was why matrix management – an early attempt to overcome management silos – failed to deliver what was optimistically expected of it. Turned out that one dimension of the matrix would get privileged over the other. Incidentally, that was why the tripartite system set up by Gordon Brown to improve the UK’s financial system a decade ago was intelligent attempt to replace silos with joined-up thinking. But it was never going to solve a problem, only help expose possible dilemmas and ambiguities of control.

Ackoff worked with Stafford Beer on his trips to the UK, on a plan to remodel business educations along more holistic lines. The first of their experiments was in The Manchester Business School whose first leaders (in the late1960s) introduced a systems-based management system. The system attempted to foster creativity and a healthy operational environment. This was to be a ‘viable self-structuring system’ with appropriately open communication with egalitarian leadership. Come to think of it, the Ackoff-Beer vision was an early attempt to design an organisation based on joined-up management.

This month is the centenary death of Peter Drucker. While I was searching the web about him I found an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal from 1993. In this Drucker tries to explain why some turnarounds fail and others don’t. At the core Drucker sais it is all about rethinking the business model.

Read the article here.

My blogging colleague, Bob Morris, is more able to tackle this post than I am — but here’s my try.

I was reading a couple of the speeches in the great William Safire compilation, Lend Me Your Ears.  (I blogged about this before here and  here, and Bob reviewed the compilation here).  I read this toast: George Bernard Shaw:  George Bernard Shaw Salutes His Friend Albert Einstein.  It is a remarkable piece.  Here is a key excerpt from the beginning of his toast:

Napoleon and other great men were makers of empires, but these eight men whom I am about to mention were makers of universes…  I go back twenty-five hundred years, and how many can I count in that period?  I can count them on the fingers of my two hands.
Pythagoras, Ptolemy, Kepler, Copernicus, Aristotle, Galileo, Newton, and Einstein – and I still have two fingers left vacant…
Newton made a universe which lasted for three hundred years.  Einstein has made a universe, which I suppose you want me to say will never stop, but I don’t know how long it will last.

George Bernard Shaw

 

It was the phrase “makers of universes” that grabbed my imagination.  I really don’t think that we can put the business luminaries listed above in the same category.  (Well, maybe Drucker).  But in a lesser sense, and certainly in a narrower arena, I think we can say that these business thinker/business book giants have created at least some small universes.

Here’s what I mean.  When you think of “leadership,” you think of Bennis.  When you think of studying successful companies, extracting their secrets, you think of Peters and Collins.  Collins “hedgehog principle” has become part of our vocabulary.  And Gladwell is the true master at introducing phrases that become part of our understanding and vital parts of our vocabularies, (even if he borrows the ideas from others):  “tipping point,” “outliers,” the “10,000 hour rule.”

And, if you had only one you could read, you could make the case that Drucker is the one you would choose.  Many have observed that in communication, Aristotle said it first, and everyone else simply provides commentary and updates illustrations.  Well, in business, Drucker said it first, and everything else builds, in one way or another, on his work.

As I said earlier, Bob Morris is far more qualified to choose the names that could be called the “makers of the business universe.”  But I like the quest – who are the voices, the minds, that have most shaped our usable understanding of business effort and success?  Who has created our business universe?

Imagem extraída do site http://www.druckerinstitute.com/

Peter Drucker

Peter Ferdinand Drucker nasceu em 19 de novembro de 1909 nos arredores de Viena, Áustria.Filho de Caroline Bondi,formada em
medicina e Adolf Drucker, advogado.
o pequeno Drucker foi criado num ambiente de idéias fecundas, proporcionado pela convivência
da família com cientistas, oficiais do governo e intelectuais. Aos 09 anos de idade, recebeu de sua professora, Miss Elsa, uma lição que o acompanharia até o fim de seus dias – “aprender a aprender” e que no futuro viria a se tornar uma espécie de mantra entre os pensadores da Administração. Na juventude, após ter se graduado na Döbling Gymnasium, Drucker mudou-se para a Hamburgo, Alemanha em busca de oportunidades de trabalho. Em Hamburgo Drucker conseguiu emprego como aprendiz numa empresa distribuidora de algodão. Pouco tempo depois tornou-se correspondente do Österreichische Volkswirt, em seguida mudou-se para Frankfurt, onde atuou no jornal Daily Frankfurter General-Anzeiger formando-se nesta cidade Doutor em Direito Internacional e Direito Público pela Universidade de Frankfurt.
Nos anos seguintes, Drucker daria os primeiros passos na direção de tornar-se um dos pensadores mais influentes do século ao despertar para a importância da inovação e do empreendedorismo na base das organizações, Influenciado por Joseph Schumpeter, economista austríaco amigo de seu pai. Outra influência, ainda que por oposição de idéias veio do economista John Maynard Keynes sobre o qual o próprio Drucker viria a declarar:” De repente percebi que Keynes e todos os demais brilhantes estudantes de economia da sala estavam interessados no comportamento das commodities” afirmou Drucker “enquanto eu estava interessado no comportamento das pessoas”
Esse foco nas pessoas foi um grande marco na obra de Drucker. Nas décadas seguintes, ele desenvolveria seu trabalho em torno das relações humanas, das oportunidades que as organizações possuem para trazer à tona o melhor do ser humano e de como os trabalhadores podem encontrar um senso de comunidade e dignidade numa sociedade moderna organizada ao redor de grandes corporações.
Em 1943, residindo nos Estados Unidos e prestes a naturalizar-se cidadão daquele país, Drucker recebe um convite que iria consolidar as bases de suas teorias. Donaldson Brown, o cérebro por detrás da gigante dos automóveis General Motors o convida para uma verdadeira “imersão” nas estruturas da empresa com direito a participação em reuniões da diretoria, entrevistas com
funcionários e análises dos processos de tomada de decisão. Desta experiência nasceu o primeiro livro de Drucker voltado para
Administração “The Concept of Corporation” no qual o autor analisa com profundidade as estruturas multidivisionais da GM. O livro gerou centenas de artigos. Alfred Sloan, CEO da GM na época, manifestou-se duramente contra o livro,chegando a proibir até mesmo a simples menção da obra segundo afirmou posteriormente o próprio Drucker.Esse antagonismo de idéias entre Sloan e Drucker iria persistir durante os próximos anos, embora Drucker tenha admitido por diversas vezes a admiração que cultivava em relação aos livros publicados por Sloan e esse por sua vez endossava a importância
do trabalho de Drucker para o desenvolvimento dos estudos sobre a Administração. Nos anos seguintes, Drucker publicaria inúmeros livros que influenciariam profundamente o pensamento sobre a moderna gestão nas empresas, prevendo tendências que vieram a tornar-se fatos, como por exemplo o surgimento da figura do “trabalhador do conhecimento” e da importância estratégica da globalização no cenário empresarial mundial.
Sobre o rótulo de “guru” que lhe atribuíam com frequência, Drucker certa vez afirmou “(…) utilizamos a palavra ‘guru’ apenas porque a palavra ‘charlatão’ é grande demais para constar nos cabeçalhos”
Drucker faleceu em novembro de 2005 aos 96 anos de idade. Além de autor, Drucker era palestrante,professor e consultor, tendo trabalhado para corporações como Intel, Coca-Cola, IBM entre outras, ”workaholic” até o último suspiro, um dos maiores méritos de Drucker, que se considerava “caçador de tendências” foi ressaltar a importância do ser humano nas organizações em oposição a visão mecanicista do taylorismo. Seus pensamentos deram forma a muitos conceitos e práticas utilizados até os dias de hoje nas corporações. O que Drucker certamente não sabia é que iria fazer tanta falta…Num tempo de aridez de idéias como o nosso no qual uma sociedade confusa e perplexa diante da velocidade que a era digital impõe está ávida por mentes brilhantes como as de Drucker que possam auxiliar na modelagem de um futuro melhor.

(Artigo baseado em informações extraídas do site da Drucker Foundation, Wikipédia e outras fontes cujas referências encontram-se abaixo. Traduções do inglês  feitas pelo autor do blog)

„Die Vernunft, das haben wir von Kant gelernt, ist das auf die Spitze getriebene Vermögen, sich selbst nicht über den Weg zu trauen“, so Dirk Baecker, Professor für Kulturtheorie und Kulturanalyse an der Zeppelin Universtät in Friedrichhafen. Technomanager scheinen diese Selbstskepsis nicht an den Tag zu legen. Sie vertrauen ihrem eigenen Expertenwissen mehr als externe Erkenntnisse. Persönliche Erfahrungen sind für Entscheider der ITK-Branche nach Erkenntnissen des Unternehmensberaters Bernhard Steimel von MIND Consult die wichtigste Wissensquelle. Das könne schnell in die Hose gehen. Die interne Sicht über Marktmechanismen und Kundenzufriedenheit sollte durch externe Erkenntnisse ergänzt werden. Eine solche Außensicht liefere oftmals wichtige Erkenntnisse abseits bequemer Wahrheiten. Entscheider sollten aufpassen, nicht Opfer einer selbstkonstruierten Wirklichkeit zu werden.

Nur jedes zehnte Unternehmen bewertet den Grad der Informiertheit als unzureichend. Diese subjektiv positive Einschätzung sollte allerdings nicht mit dem tatsächlichen Ausmaß der Marktforschung gleichgesetzt werden. „Besonders im Vergleich mit reiferen Branchen sollten die ITK-Unternehmen den Grad ihrer Informiertheit kritisch hinterfragen“, so der Rat von Steimel. Siehe auch das Youtube-Video:

Wer nur im eigenen Saft schmort, läuft Gefahr, zu erstarren und wichtige Entwicklungen des Marktes zu verschlafen. Oder systemisch ausgedrückt „Intelligenz und Innovation in Unternehmen hängen davon ab, welche Informationen beobachtet werden und wie die wichtigen Informationen ihren gebührenden Stellenwert erhalten – was man leider erst im Nachhinein wissen kann“, schreibt Professor Winfried W. Weber in seinem Buch „complicate your life“ (Verlag Sordon).

Der Managementdenker Peter Drucker kritisiert die Sichtweise von Managern, die sich eng nur auf das eigene Unternehmen bezieht. „Viele Manager leben noch im 19. Jahrhundert, als Neuerungen aus der Firma oder aus der Branche kamen. Heute hingegen sind es im Wesentlichen die Veränderungen um das Unternehmen herum, die die Geschicke der Firma beeinflussen.“ Innovationen entstünden nicht nur aus Fortentwicklungen und Patenten innerhalb des eignen Fachspektrums. Heute kämen in viel stärkerem Maß als früher gesellschaftliche Entwicklungen hinzu, die als Ausgangspunkt für Innovationen erkannt werden müssten (nachzulesen im Buch „Peter Drucker – Der Mann, der das Management geprägt hat“, herausgegeben von Professor Weber).

Ein kluger Manager führt im richtigen Moment herumschwirrende Ideen mit Akteuren zusammen, nutzt Marktungleichgewichte, erkennt die Lücke und setzt die Innovation durch oder übernimmt im richtigen Moment das Risiko einer nicht sicheren aber vielversprechenden Entscheidung. „Das unterscheidet ihn vom Verwalter, der die organisatorische Routine oder die organisatorisch geronnene Reduktion von Komplexität nicht mehr in Frage stellen kann“, erläutert Weber. Wie bei den Schachgroßmeistern gehe es im Management einer komplexer werdenden Welt darum, ein reiches und komplexes Spielfeld zu erhalten. „Die Disziplin verlässt die Entscheidungskultur des one-best-way, des Alles-im-Griff-haben-Wollens. Wer es versteht, sich von der Komplexität nicht überfordern zu lassen, wer erkennt, dass man immer weniger durchschaut, wer sein Spielfeld pflegt und damit rechnet, dass bald die Lücke kommt, kann dann sofort entscheiden, ohne zu zögerlich zu sein“, führt Weber aus. Oder in den Worten des Kybernetikers Heinz von Foerster: „Handle stets so, dass die Anzahl der Möglichkeiten wächst.“