4/23/23, A.M. On Peter Drucker
This blog post is going to be a little long.
Three sections:
PART 1: Tell me about Peter Drucker
PART 2: Drucker, Alfred P. Sloan quotes, from “The Daily Drucker: 366 Days of Insight and Motivation for Getting the Right Things Done” (DD)
PART 3: A.M. Responses
P1: Tell me about Peter Drucker
Peter Drucker was an Austrian-American management consultant, educator, and author who is widely regarded as one of the most influential thinkers in the field of management.
He is often referred to as the "father of modern management."
Drucker was born in Austria in 1909 and earned a doctorate in international law and economics from the University of Frankfurt.
He also worked as a journalist in Germany before moving to the United States in 1937. A fellow truth seeker, like me or Billy Wilder (Shmuel Vildr).
In the 1940s, Drucker began writing about management, and became a professor at the New York University Graduate School of Business Administration.
Drucker's contributions to the field of management include his emphasis on the importance of management as a profession, and his focus on the human element of organizations.
He believed that effective management required a deep understanding of people and their motivations, and that managers should prioritize the development of their employees.
That businesses needed to constantly adapt to changing environments.
That innovation was key to maintaining a competitive edge.
Drucker wrote more than 30 books on management, economics, and society. Some of his most famous works include "The Practice of Management," "Innovation and Entrepreneurship," and "The Effective Executive," which Bezos enjoyed reading.
The Daily Drucker is a collection of 366 daily readings that have been harvested from Drucker's lifetime of work by Joseph A. Maciariello (1941-2020), Peter Drucker’s ‘Legitimate Successor’ .
The (excellent) book starts with a quote, a Drucker excerpt, and an action item that spells out exactly how to put Drucker's ideas into practice in your life or organization.
Imagine the most action-oriented management consultant in the world is in the room, offering his timeless gems of advice to start your morning.
I, a person who seeks to understand and put to use Drucker's powerful words and ideas, absolutely adore this book and read it daily every day all year.
His ideas on the importance of human capital, innovation, and entrepreneurship, within and outside, have helped me shape the way the organization I currently work for, Per Scholas, operates in the field of technical workforce development.
P2: DD Quotes
“An important task for top management in the next society’s corporation will be to balance the three dimensions of the corporation: as an economic organization, as a human organization and as an increasingly important social organization” - Feb 26 Daily Drucker
“Mr. Sloan, how can you afford to spend four hours on a minor job like this?” (context: picking a low level mechanic at a GM plant in Dayton, Ohio)
“This corporation pays me a pretty good salary,” he said, “for making the important decisions, and for making them right….
If that master mechanic in Dayton is the wrong man, our decisions might as well be written on water. He converts them into performance. And as for taking a lot of time, that’s horse apples” (his strongest and favorite epithet)….
“If we didn’t spend four hours on placing a man and placing him right, we’d spend four hundred hours on cleaning up after our mistake—and that time I wouldn’t have. The decision,” he concluded, “about people is the only truly crucial one. You think and everybody thinks that a company can have ‘better’ people. All it can do is place people right—and then it’ll have performance.”
Apr 21 DD (Drucker quoting Alfred P. Sloan)
P3: Response
In the past 50 years, as the late Professor Joseph (quoting Drucker) points out, we have seen three countries rise up and focus on one of three dimensions.
America, the economic dimension.
Germany, the social.
Japan, the human.
None of the three is good enough on its own in 2023.
Your organization, be it a company of 1 or 5 or 500 or 50,000, needs to make corrections in one of these dimensions.
When I was younger I was obsessed with schedules. Just as a concept.
Like, who decided what kids get to do in public school buildings all day?
Managers, probably. Or someone who studied management or administration.
As a kid I habitually wrote down in my Apple Notes app on my second generation iPod Touch, later iPhone, all my schedules from freshman year of high school.
I’m not going to bore you with my lifetime of schedules. But I will list a few things I noted about effective schedules gathered during my almost 27 years on this planet.
Drucker, and the reader of this blog, might agree with me, time is finite capital.
Your goal is to spend your time and energy and money towards these three dimensions, for your side hustle or your main gig or anything.
An economic part.
A human part.
A social part.
Schedule time for all of it - work, family, friends, exercise, sleep, journaling, blogging online to help other folks.
As Stoic philosopher-king Emperor Marcus Antoninus wrote in Book 5 of The Meditations (I like Hayes translation personally), “help men as best you may and as they deserve, even though their loss be of something indifferent”
I cannot keep all my gathered knowledge for myself.
I feel I need to blog about it to help readers like you.
I might even find translators so my work can be read in other languages.
Take care of your economic health by showing up to work on time and being focused on your job while you do it. Be indistractable.
I am proud to say my most recent class AWS re/Start class at Per Scholas finished with a 92% certification rate, in terms of passing the AWS CCP exam. Many of my teammates had similar or higher rates.
As James Clear writes in Chapter 13 of Atomic Habits, "If you can't learn the basic skill of showing up, then you have little hope of mastering the finer details [of your desired habit].
Master the art of showing up… Just get your reps in.”
Your reps do not need to be perfect.
They just need to be scheduled, and checked off, then you go on a run and do more!
I like filling my green exercise ring every day on Apple Watch, and right now it is 63 minutes.
There is a treadmill in the gym of my apartment building, and I have trained myself so I just need to put on my socks, and I will take the stairs (not the elevator!) to the treadmill.
Sometimes I do 29 minutes, sometimes it is a full 30, sometimes I fall a little short like 14 or something, but I make sure to keep moving and fill it later.
It does not matter that it fell short of my expectation, just that I showed up and did the walk and managed myself and my workplace well.
READER ACTION ITEM:
Get folks in your organization, no matter how big, to do their checklists.
Build momentum, show positive emotion on Zoom if you are a Remote Trainer like me, motivate like Ted Lasso, suddenly you have a positive growth environment.
My organization is a knowledge organization that trains people in technology.
My managers understand that in between classes, instructors like myself must upskill in new skills that can help the individual career of the instructor or the organization.
SHOUTOUT TO:
The one, the only, the AWSome Michael Boggs, Director, Technical Instruction (AWS) at Per Scholas, to end this post.
Mr. Boggs encouraged me to pursue management education in the downtime between my scheduled classes this year, and it has been transformational.
Mike, if you happen to be a reader of this, thanks for your encouragement! Wherever you are, know that I think you are an AWSome manager at our organization!
And so are you, reader 🐐 check out more of my media here, or on my LinkedIn.
