Barry's Blog

"If it's not in your front room, then make it someone else's front room.” 
-Peter Drucker, on the need to focus on core competences 

Peter Drucker, widely regarded as the father of modern management, did something unusual some sixteen months before his death in November, 2005. He provided Elizabeth Haas Edersheim with unprecedented access to his thoughts on the world of business. Ms. Edersheim, a well respected management thinker in her own right, conducted numerous interviews with Drucker in those months before his death. "I had hoped for one hour of his time," she writes of their first meeting. "We talked for two." Thereafter, they spent countless hours talking in Drucker's modest ranch house in Claremont, California. Many of their discussions focused on the development of modern business throughout his life, which spanned nearly 75 years of his career as writer, consultant, and teacher, and how it continued to grow and change at an ever-increasing rate. Ms. Edershiem's, The Definitive Drucker, represents the distillation of Drucker's ruminations on business management.

Drucker believed that the challenges facing companies in the present world were more dramatic than anything he had seen in his own long lifetime. Consumers were gaining unprecedented power, and bright new companies were inventing not just new products, but new human needs! (Who could imagine that it would seem impossible to live without carrying thousands of songs around in your pocket?). Who would believe that seven of the top ten companies which had realized the greatest growth in share value over the past five years had not even existed a few decades ago?

To thrive in such a competitive environment, Drucker believed that companies would have to rethink everything, like partnering with "rivals" and listening to customers so that they could truly view themselves from "outside in." They would need to tap new sources of talent, and focus fiercely on their "core" competencies. 

As for individuals, Drucker observed that they are now in charge of their own progress: "Knowledge workers are neither bosses nor workers," he said, "but rather something in between - resources who have responsibility for developing their most important resource, brainpower, and who also need to take more control of their own careers." In the new economy of the 21st century, every man is no longer a king who rules (think Jack Nicholson in the film, About Schmidt), but the CEO of his own career. 

Arguably Drucker's most profound (and disturbing) commentary about the challenges we face in our contemporary world reads:

"In a few hundred years, when the history of our time will be written from a long-term perspective, I think that it is very probable that the most important event these historians will see is not technology, it is not the Internet, it is not e-commerce. It is an unprecedented change in the human condition. For the first time - and I mean that literally - substantial and rapidly growing numbers of people have choices. For the first time, they will have to manage themselves."

What did Drucker mean? Was he right? If so, what are the implications of his thinking? Are not freedom and a multitude of choices considered the epitome of the American Dream?

For FinishingWell,

Barry Morrow