The Essential Drucker

How in the world can more than 60 years of Peter Drucker’s ideas and theories and beautiful essays on business and management be boiled down to a little more than 600 words?

The simple answer, to be honest, is that the task is impossible.

Drucker churned out dozens of books, hundreds of columns and thousands of articles during his years in front of his typewriter and his audience. From 1939, when he was in his late 20s, until his death in 2005, he never went more than four years without a new book on the shelf – only World War II managed to keep him on the sideline even that long – and they were all filled with what were then groundbreaking ideas on business and management.

No writer has meant more to modern business than Drucker.

For that reason, Business Bookshelf this month will be less of a review of “The Essential Drucker” – a collection of a couple dozen of his most important essays – and more of a highlight of some of the ideas he shared that are most applicable to the business world.
 

Innovation is key to growth, but management is key to success.
Drucker often wrote that the idea of management was about so much more than facts and figures, bottom lines and bottom dollars. It was about human interactions, about people. “Its task,” he wrote in 1988, “is to make people capable of joint performance, to make their strengths effective and their weaknesses irrelevant.” Remember that when you manage your own employees. If you have no relationship with them, and if they have no relationship with each other, you’re more likely to fail.
 

The only purposes of a business are marketing and innovation.
No matter the business or industry, those purposes remain the same. You must market yourself to your customer and you must show some sort of innovation, whether in your products, your process, your service or some other area. “All the customer is interested in,” Drucker wrote in 1974, “are his or her own values, wants and reality.” Before anything else, a business must be able to create its own customer.
 

There will always be a market for leaders.
There is no limit on who can be a great leader, just on what defines a great leader -- and, according to Drucker, that definition is clear. “Leadership rests on being able to do something others cannot do at all or find difficult to do even poorly,” he wrote in 1994. “It rests on core competencies that meld market or customer value with a special ability of the producer or supplier.” Want to be a great leader? Just be able to do what others cannot.
 

Always think about what you do on the job.
Do you run a department? Are you in charge of 50 or 60 employees? Or do you think more broadly about your responsibilities? “The man who focuses on efforts,” Drucker wrote in 1966, “is a subordinate no matter how exalted his title and rank. But the man who focuses on contribution and who takes responsibility for results, no matter how junior, is ... ‘top management.’” In short, think more about what you do, not about what you run.
 

Know your strengths and forget about your weaknesses.
Do you even know your real strengths and weaknesses? Most folks don’t, even if they say they do. The only way to determine them, Drucker wrote in 1999, is to write down what you expect will happen prior to making a key decision, then look back nine or 12 months later at what you wrote. Do this consistently and, over two or three years, your strengths and weaknesses will reveal themselves.
 

Mat LaWell is a freelance writer in Cleveland.