6 Crucial Management Tips from Peter Drucker

Guest article from Bruce Rosenstein, author of Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life

Despite the almost infinite amount of management books and advice available today, there is considerable value in going back to the original source, Peter Drucker, “the father of modern management.” Drucker had an amazing 70 year career as a writer, consultant and teacher, with nearly 40 books. He was a trusted advisor to Fortune 500 firms such as Procter & Gamble and General Electric, and to such nonprofits as the Salvation Army and the Girl Scouts of the USA. He died in 2005 at 95, and was working until not long before his death.

I have seriously studied Drucker’s work since 1986, including interviewing and writing about him for USA TODAY and other publications. My book about Drucker and individual self-development, Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life, was published by Berrett-Koehler on August 1, 2009.

Especially because of the turmoil and uncertainty of the past year, clear-headed and timeless advice can help guide managers whether you work in business or elsewhere. Think about how you can apply these 6 tips based on Drucker’s thought and writings:

1. Develop yourself as well as others: Drucker believed that to successfully help others to develop, you need to practice self-development. That means living a multidimensional life with a diverse set of people, pursuits and activities. “What matters,” he has said, “is that the knowledge worker, by the time he or she reaches middle age, has developed and nourished a human being rather than a tax accountant or a hydraulic engineer. Otherwise, a few years later, tax accounting or hydraulic engineering will become awfully stale and boring.”
2. Build on integrity: It is a given that you need competence and a talent for working with others. However, in 1952, he wrote something simple, yet profound: “Fundamentally the one quality demanded of you will not be skill, knowledge, or talent, but character.” In the posthumously released 2008 book Management: Revised Edition, he put it another way:  “What a manager does can be analyzed systematically. What a manager has to be able to do can be learned. But there is one qualification the manager cannot acquire but must bring to the task. It is not genius: it is character.”
3. Pay attention to what’s happening outside your four walls: Drucker said we are too focused on what happens within our own organizations, missing out on opportunities that originate elsewhere. Talk to customers, (and non-customers) and suppliers. Meet people in other walks of life by volunteering and working for or partnering with nonprofit organizations. Open yourself to curiosity and love of learning.
4. Practice systematic abandonment: On a regular basis, ask yourself if you would go into a particular activity or line of business if you weren’t doing it already. If the answer is negative, decide what you will do about it. This works both organizationally and for individual activities. You may have to give up or scale back things that are enjoyable, or still seem important to you.
5. Figure out the theory of your business: What does your organization get paid for?  This represents your assumptions about technology, customers, mission, core competencies, competition and other segments around which your organization revolves. Too many organizations, he believed, had outdated or simply incorrect assumptions, which could lead to disaster. Although this is more relevant for businesses than nonprofits, the latter still needs to ask similar questions about their reasons for existence.
6. Practice information responsibility: Ask yourself what information you owe to people you work with, and on whom you depend. Consider what form that information should be in, and what time frame is right for them. The flip side of this is to ask what information you need to do your job and who you will get it from, as well as the form and time frame.

The above practices may be simple and even somewhat obvious, if only in retrospect. But they are not necessarily easy. The manager who masters all or most of them, even if it takes a long time, will be the one with the best opportunity for having both a meaningful and satisfying life and career that aids the growth and well-being of his or her organization.

About the author: Bruce Rosenstein is a veteran journalist and librarian and a leading expert on the life and work of management icon Peter Drucker. Author of Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life (Berrett-Koehler, 2009), Rosenstein has studied, interviewed, and written about Drucker for more than two decades, conducting one of the last interviews Drucker gave, seven months before his death in 2005 at 95.

Rosenstein worked at USA TODAY for 21 years, serving as the first-ever “embedded librarian” in the News department, and writing about business and management books for the newspaper’s Money section. Today, he is an active speaker, writer, and freelance journalist, and a lecturer for The Catholic University of America’s School of Library and Information Science.

All images courtesy of Bruce Rosenstein