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Jim Collins—author of Good to Great—noted three primary elements of Drucker’s teaching impact:
- He pushed his students to think for themselves, rather than simply telling them what to think.
- Peter changed not just the minds of his students but their lives and, through them, the lives of other people.
- Peter got a high “Return on Luck” with the right students.
The best-performing leaders and their companies were not luckier—they did not get more good luck, less bad luck, better timing of luck, or bigger spikes of luck than the less-successful comparison cases. However, they did achieve a higher return on luck. They took whatever luck events they got, whether good luck or bad luck, recognized them, seized them, and made more out of them than others.
Drucker infused all of his work with the great compassion and concern for the individual, and this is the cornerstone of what made him a great teacher.
When Bob Buford asked what could be done to advance Peter’s legacy, Drucker impatiently waved the question away: “My legacy is my writing.”
Buford explained, “Peter was one of those rare individuals who really did practice what he preached. His motivation for all that he did professionally was to contribute toward a ‘fully functioning society,’ and for Peter that began with a fully functioning human being.”
YOU MAY GO NOW
“This time he’s not coming back.” —DORIS DRUCKER
How many times did he say, “Begin with the end in sight”?
Peter taught Buford how to learn and the importance of continually aiming higher, a striving for perfection that he had picked up from the great Italian composer, Giuseppe Verdi. Every three years Peter selected a subject and then immersed himself in it.
As famed management writer Tom Peters once put it: “Drucker effectively bypassed the intellectual establishment. So it’s not surprising that they hated his guts.” But Peter didn’t care. He was not concerned that a building or institute be named after him.
BEWARE THE MAN ON THE WHITE HORSE
“No century has seen more leaders with more charisma than the Twentieth Century, and never have political leaders done greater damage than the four giant leaders of the Twentieth Century: Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler and Mao.” —PETER DRUCKER
Sigmund Freud was known as the “father of psychoanalysis.” Peter would go on to be celebrated as the “father of modern management,” a title that held little interest or fondness for him.
Peter arrived in Frankfurt around the same time Hitler held his first Nazi meeting in Berlin. Peter recognized the threat brought by a charismatic “savior.”
“To make our institutions perform responsibly, autonomously, and on a high level of achievement is thus the only safeguard of freedom and dignity in the pluralistic society of institutions,” Drucker once wrote. “Performing, responsible management is the alternative to tyranny and our only protection against it.”
His fellow Austrian, the economist Joseph Schumpeter, said something that would change the trajectory of his life: “I know it is not enough to be remembered for books and theories. One does not make a difference unless it is a difference in people’s lives.” This is really what Peter was all about: making a difference.
While he was intensely interested in management as a profession, he believed that corporations—fast emerging as perhaps our most important institutions—had to be effective and responsible if we were to have a functioning society.
“Beware the man on the white horse,” Peter used to warn.
“No century has seen more leaders with more charisma than the Twentieth Century, and never have political leaders done greater damage than the four giant leaders of the Twentieth Century: Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler and Mao,” he declared in The New Realities. The best way to inoculate against such destruction, according to Peter, is to help people get the best out of themselves for their own benefit as well as the benefit of others.
The Practice of Management was the first book that put it all together. It laid the foundation for the discipline of management and propelled Peter into a career that would include teaching, writing, and consulting.
FIRST ENCOUNTER
“Drucker’s primary contribution is not a single idea, but rather an entire body of work that has one gigantic advantage: nearly all of it is essentially right. Drucker has an uncanny ability to develop insights about the workings of the social world, and to later be proved right by history.” —JIM COLLINS
Following Peter’s wisdom was analogous to investing in an index fund. He wasn’t always right, but he beat the market 80 percent of the time. Peter’s thinking, so highly principled, was solid as granite. He saw money as a necessity to finance a business that grows and serves customers—not money for the sole purpose of getting rich.
Jim Collins, the best-selling management writer, was later to say in the foreword to The Daily Drucker, “Drucker’s primary contribution is not a single idea, but rather an entire body of work that has one gigantic advantage: nearly all of it is essentially right. Drucker has an uncanny ability to develop insights about the workings of the social world, and to later be proved right by history.”
STRICTLY BUSINESS
“He normally begins about a thousand years away from the point and goes in a very wide loop that arrives at the point exactly. He uses illustrations from many disciplines to shed light on the point he is making, and each story builds on the last. He wants you to think about your situation in a larger context.” —FRED SMITH
One of the unconventional lessons Peter taught was that you can’t really do two things at once. He never bought into the heralded claims about “multitasking.”
Fred Smith once described Peter’s way of answering a question: “He normally begins about a thousand years away from the point and goes in a very wide loop that arrives at the point exactly. He uses illustrations from many disciplines to shed light on the point he is making, and each story builds on the last. He wants you to think about your situation in a larger context.” When he started talking you weren’t quite sure he understood the question, but by the time he finished you realized he had done more than just answer your question. He showed you the reason why you asked the question.
As Buford was beginning to learn from Peter, his real business—his primary interest in management—was not for the sake of business itself, but for the people it touches, serves, and influences. For the first time in his relationship as client-consultant, Buford realized that Peter cared as much for him as a fellow human being as he did for me as a young, ambitious entrepreneur.
EXTRAORDINARILY ORDINARY
“Books about business deal with functions and strategies—the mechanics of running a successful company. Fiction teaches you about human beings—how they think, how they behave, what’s important to them. I’m more interested in people than I am in how businesses work.” —PETER DRUCKER
Work that you enjoy and that makes a contribution to a greater good ought to be enough to make any of us happy. Peter was an original thinker, a self-created, one-of-a-kind individual who comes along every two or three centuries. This may sound overly flattering, but Peter was to management what Shakespeare was to literature.
“Books about business deal with functions and strategies—the mechanics of running a successful company,” Drucker said. “Fiction teaches you about human beings—how they think, how they behave, what’s important to them. I’m more interested in people than I am in how businesses work.” This was quintessential Drucker, a man who always described management as a “human activity” rather than a tool or process for running a business.
Peter devoted his life to giving a language and structure to the discipline of management, where there wasn’t any before. This is what separated Peter from so many business “experts.”
Others often described Peter as the “greatest futurist alive,” but he had little regard for crystal-ball predictions. The way he put it was, “You can’t predict the future. What you can do is look out the window and see the futurity of present events.”
As Steve Forbes wrote in The Wall Street Journal, “Peter Drucker’s ability to prophesy—almost always correctly—was uncanny.”
LESSONS FROM PETER
“Peter began to have grave doubts about business and even capitalism itself. He no longer saw the corporation as an ideal space to create community. In fact, he saw nearly the opposite: a place where self-interest had triumphed over the egalitarian principles he long championed.” —JOHN BYRNE
Buford wrote, “Mainlining Scripture for most of my adult life has, I hope, given me a reliable moral compass as well as a sense of my role in the story of God’s journey with mankind.”
As the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard put it: “The only way to avoid despair is to have faith that, in God’s time, time and eternity become one. That both life and death are meaningful.”
Peter wrote: “All work is for a team. No individual has the temperament and the skill to do every job. The purpose of a team is to make strengths productive and weaknesses irrelevant.”
Early on we learned the value of not just serving your customer, but knowing him and understanding his unique needs (another Drucker axiom).
Here’s a concept Buford learned from Peter: planned abandonment. If you are diagnosed with cancer, don’t spend a lot of time thinking about your options.
It was not unusual for Peter to begin a meeting by saying, “Tell me what you’re not doing.” In other words, not everything you try is going to work out, so what have you decided not to do?
With people, you focus on performance, not potential. You focus on what they can do—their strengths—not on what they might do sometime in the future. What they can’t do is someone else’s job.
Peter frequently used the metaphor of a symphony conductor when he talked about management.
The role of the conductor is to make sure the right people are playing the right instruments so that when the baton came down, the symphony made great music.
Peter taught to never try turning an oboe player into a violinist. Don’t complain about people’s weaknesses but always focus on their strengths and move them into areas where those strengths can thrive.
One of the most important lessons Peter taught was his conviction that an organization begins to die the day it begins to be run for the benefit of the insiders and not for the benefit of the customers. The numbing gridlock we see in our legislature today is a perfect example of Peter’s analysis that such ineffectiveness is always the result of an organization looking out for itself rather than those it was intended to serve.
SUCCESS TO SIGNIFICANCE
“My performance as president and CEO was becoming more important than my performance as a human being.” —BOB BUFORD
Buford explained that his administrative assistant—a woman about fifteen years older—confronted him with some unsolicited and initially unwelcome criticism. Buford was flying all over the country chasing deals and doing whatever it took to add to the bottom line of his company, but this brave lady saw something that bothered her. “Mr. Buford, I think you need to know that you frighten me,” she carefully began, obviously aware that this was not the best way to begin a conversation with your boss. “You are so concerned about outperforming everyone else and making a lot of money that I’m afraid you’re going to lose things that are valuable to you.”
Peter felt that a leader needed to pay attention to those he or she was trying to lead. Peter approached problems by asking questions. So, Buford paid attention to his assistant’s criticism and then asked himself two questions: Was she right? And, if so, what did he need to do about it?
He recognized that his performance as president and CEO was becoming more important than his performance as a human being.
Buford needed to consider significance—investing yourself in a mission or dream that transcends material success and aligns with your most deeply held core values.
Buford noted, “I could not shake the feeling that despite all the success I was having in both my professional and personal lives, I might be missing something even better. I would not find the direction I was looking for until I chose either God or money as being the primary recipient of my loyalty. I describe this process in greater detail in my first book, Halftime. I chose God. Once I had made that commitment, we developed a plan that called for me to devote about 20 percent of my time to my business with the remaining 80 percent of my time given over to God. But what exactly did that mean?”
As he learned from Peter, to get the most effective results you must “build on the islands of health and strength.” Drucker told Buford not to focus on dribs and drabs, or “fritter energy away,” as he actually said it. That’s what most philanthropists do—a little donation here, and a little donation there, and they wake up at the end of the year and have nothing to show for it except that they went to a lot of charity balls.
Peter said, “You need to use your energy where you can get results.” Peter encouraged Buford to look for things that make a quantum difference, not incremental gains. “Giving is not a result,” he frequently reminded me. “Changed lives are!”
Finally, Peter encouraged Buford to “look for things that are ready to happen.” Timing is everything. Buford had never really connected the word “entrepreneur” with pastor, but the more he thought about it, the more it made sense. If God’s idea of the church was conceived as a strategy for transforming the world, why not go about it in the most professional and effective manner possible? And if all knowledge comes from God, why not use the “knowledge” of strategic planning, management principles, consumer research, communications, and the like to introduce more people to what we sometimes glibly call the Good News?
SECOND HALF CONSPIRACY
“Your mission, Bob, is to transform the latent energy of American Christianity into active energy.” —PETER DRUCKER
Buford’s “first half” had been devoted entirely to building business. Like most men between the ages of twenty-five and forty, he was the true hunter-gatherer, chasing down the saber-toothed tiger of success.
Buford recognized that he needed to change his game plan for the second half. He was in halftime. He knew his second half would focus more on aligning his time, treasure, and talent with his faith.
Peter clearly understood and supported Buford’s vision for a second half that focused on his faith. Call it coincidence, or providence, but this new direction in life occurred just as Peter was shifting his emphasis from the private sector to the nonprofit sector. Peter studied them from the inside out and had high regard for them: “The Salvation Army is by far the most effective organization in the U.S.,” he said in a 1997 interview in Forbes. “No one even comes close to it in respect to clarity of mission, ability to innovate, measurable results, dedication to putting money to maximum use.” (See my post on The Salvation Army.)
One of the first things Peter did when he consulted with an organization was to ask them about their mission—what it was they intend to do. In a Harvard Business Review article he wrote, “The best nonprofits devote a great deal of time to defining their organization’s mission. They avoid sweeping statements full of good intentions and focus, instead, on objectives that have clear-cut implications for the work their members perform—staff and volunteers both.” Peter succinctly paraphrased the Salvation Army’s mission statement as: “Take the losers, the rejects of society and make self-respecting citizens out of them.”
“Your mission, Bob, is to transform the latent energy of American Christianity into active energy.” Just like that, Drucker nailed it.
According to most pollsters, anywhere from 70 to 85 percent of Americans consider themselves Christians. And on any given Sunday, roughly 45 percent of all Americans go to church. What if they moved from being latent to becoming active—from going to church on Sundays to being the church every day?
With Fred Smith’s help, Buford launched Leadership Network, whose mission at the time was to “identify, connect, and help high-capacity Christian leaders multiply their impact.” As Peter once told Buford, “The fruit of your work grows on other people’s trees.” The role of Leadership Network would be to provide connections, tools, and resources to help leaders minister more effectively.
PETER AND THE PREACHERS
“The function of management in a church is to make the church more church-like, not to make it more business-like.” —PETER DRUCKER
As Peter always pointed out, “The function of management in a church is to make the church more church-like, not to make it more business-like.”
Buford learned from Peter how to be the most effective leader possible. He said that very few people can do three things well, or even two things well. Most people can only do one thing really well, and once they identify that one thing and give themselves completely to it, they are the people who make the biggest difference in the world.
GO BIG OR GO HOME
“I bought one thousand, two hundred crates of tomatoes and got some of my loyal high-school kids together and we sold them door-to-door and actually raised several thousand dollars that way. In addition to that, those amazing high-school kids had part-time jobs and contributed out of their limited resources to help the church limp along.” —BILL HYBELS
As Peter dug deeper into the phenomenon of the mega-church, his enthusiasm for what they were doing grew. He had seen the decline of the church in Western Europe and believed it contributed to the decline of European culture as well. Conversely, he once said of the United States, “If this country does not survive as a Christian nation, it will not survive.” This was pure Drucker: Build on islands of strength. Look for what’s trying to happen.
To Peter, the health and effectiveness of a church was closely linked to its uniqueness as an organization that answered to a higher calling. “The church must be a community—a community with a spiritual center, not a social center. The center is commandments and not good intentions. There is a difference between the church and a tennis club, and that is the spiritual commitment that only the church can offer. The church is not a service organization.”
As Buford and Drucker discussed the various ways Buford might be able to serve the church, he offered a profound bit of advice: “Never forget that the kingdom is not of this world and that you are not substituting for a labor union.”
Seminaries did a good job of teaching potential pastors about things like church history, theology, and Greek and Hebrew. But they did a very poor job of preparing leaders. Seminaries were not producing leaders with the same skills being exhibited by the pastors of mega-churches, which helped to explain why so many traditional churches were in decline.
PURPOSEFUL INNOVATION
“I was basically doing what Peter had taught as being basic to any successful enterprise—know your customer and find out what your customer values.” —RICK WARREN
Good intentions are not enough; always measure the results of your efforts to make sure you are getting the most out of your investment of time and resources. Like Bill Hybels—and most other people who started churches that grew to have thousands of active members—Rick Warren first focused on his potential customers.
Rick Warren explained, “I was basically doing what Peter had taught as being basic to any successful enterprise—know your customer and find out what your customer values. It was Peter who taught me that leaders do not start with the question ‘What do I want to do?’ Instead, great leaders always ask, ‘What needs to be done?’”
By asking, “What needs to be done?” these mega-church pastors learned to pay attention to the needs within their communities and create churches very unlike the churches that may be doing a wonderful job with their congregations but have largely been ignored by those people we call the un-churched.
Several years ago, Lyle Schaller, a very wise and observant church-growth expert, suggested that churches go through five phases: birth, growth, stability, decline, and death.
Peter said “purposeful innovation” results from “analysis, systematic review, and hard work, and can be taught, replicated, and learned.”
Thanks to Peter’s influence, everything the pastors did was aimed at action and results: How can we apply these ideas in a practical manner that will help the church transform society? We basically ask, “What is God doing now? How can we join? What’s next?”
At Leadership Network, they observe, learn, innovate, and then provide seed resources to what appears to be the next great thing waiting to happen in Christ’s church. They also facilitate “Leadership Communities”—groups of ten to twelve leaders who meet regularly to dream, create, and execute ideas into tangible results.
MENTOR AND FRIEND
“It is through you and your friendship that I have attained in my old age a new and significant sphere of inspiration, of hope, of effectiveness: the mega-churches. You cannot possibly imagine how much this means and has meant to me, and how profoundly it has affected my life.” —PETER DRUCKER
In 1997, Atlantic Monthly editor Jack Beatty, interviewed Buford for two hours for a book he was writing, The World According to Peter Drucker. All of Buford’s pontificating on Peter had been reduced to a mere six words: “He’s the brains, I’m the legs.”
After Buford got over himself, he realized that those six words accurately captured their remarkable relationship. Peter passed along to him—and others—his vast knowledge of how the world works, and Buford applied that first to his business and then to the world of large churches. He challenged Buford with his thinking; Buford responded with a plan of action and, often with the help of others, executed it.
Beatty noted that Peter “is a thinker, not an academic,” and “above everything, he is a teacher.”
An obituary for Peter in The Economist contrasted him with “academic clones who produce papers on minute subjects in unreadable prose.” His prolific writing was never intended to impress other professors but rather to be read by actual managers.
Nine contributions characterized Peter’s influence on Buford as a mentor over the years:
- He defined the landscape.
- He defined the opportunities, the “white space”—what is needed now.
- He helped clarify strengths and capacities.
- He identified the myths, the false paths, the incorrect assumptions of the “industry” within.
- He encouraged him to “go for it.” Peter was all about action. Don’t just dream big; follow through.
- He helped sort out the right strategies.
- He affirmed results.
- He pointed out wasted effort.
- He (gently) held Buford accountable. Peter was very kind, yet direct, when he felt a “course correction” was needed.
There once was a mosaic of interlacing hands, with three of Peter’s famous questions inscribed across the bottom of the print: Who is the customer? What does the customer value? What is our business? When Peter saw it, he responded in his deep Austrian accent, “This is my life.”
THE GOD QUESTION
“Mankind needs the return to spiritual values, for it needs compassion. It needs the deep experience that the Thou and the I are one, which all higher religions share.” —PETER DRUCKER
So the obvious question from those who know Peter as “the father of modern management,” yet saw him hanging around the likes of Bill Hybels, Rick Warren, and Buford: “Was Peter a Christian?”
Peter saw religion, properly lived out by adherents, as an ally to his vision for a fully functioning society. In his 1957 book, Landmarks of Tomorrow, Peter wrote: “Society needs a return to spiritual values—not to offset the material but to make it fully productive . . . Mankind needs the return to spiritual values, for it needs compassion. It needs the deep experience that the Thou and the I are one, which all higher religions share.” Those looking to “Christianize” Peter might be inclined to point to his work with mega-church pastors as an indication of his personal beliefs.
Why would a man who could make a lot more money consulting for other organizations devote so much time during the final twenty years of his life to the likes of Bill Hybels, Rick Warren, and Bob Buford?
Whether or not he bought everything these mega-churches were selling, he was completely sold on their potential to have a positive and long-lasting influence on society.
Peter was once asked, “You have lived a life and focused intensely on life and how it’s lived. Now you’re ninety-five. What about an afterlife? What about God? How do you think about the transition that you are inevitably approaching?”
“Well, I happen to be a very conventional, traditional Christian. Period! And I don’t think about it. I am told! It’s not my job to think about it. My job is to say, ‘Yes sir!’ I say every morning and every evening, ‘Praise be to God for the beauty of his creation. Amen.’” Peter went out of his way to not offend people, especially when it came to the subject of religion. For Peter did not think it was his job to spread the gospel. His mission was to help save society.
SAVING SOCIETY
“It’s up to us now.” —JOHN BACHMAN
Peter once said that the most effective organizations in the world are nonprofits. He believed that these organizations, if managed properly, could become the best avenues for meeting human needs and alleviating suffering.
One organization—having first changed its name to Leader to Leader and now to the Frances Hesselbein Leadership Institute—supported one million social sector organizations sharing a vision of healthy children, strong families, adequate schools, decent neighborhoods—all embraced by the cohesive, inclusive community. Since its inauspicious beginnings, the organization trained more than 11,000 nonprofit leaders and provided facilitator training for 1,500 trainers who work with nonprofits.
Nothing of consequence is gained without sacrifice and struggle.
Buford notes, “Though I believe that the greatest hope for the world comes from the church, I also embrace Peter’s wider vision of people from all walks of life—and faiths—working together to protect the world from tyranny by being good, honest, industrious contributors as parents, neighbors, workers, and leaders.”
Drucker’s legacy amounted to much more than memories of the man or even his writing. Drucker’s legacy is a collection of ideas and ideals that should be acted upon by future generations of leaders responsible for the companies and communities in which we work and live.
Today, with a full-time staff based in Claremont, the Drucker Institute is . . . striving to meet its mission of “strengthening organizations to strengthen society.”
Buford’s approach to philanthropy has been “a long obedience in the same direction,” to borrow from Eugene Peterson, author and creator of the The Message translation of the Bible. He has reflected many times on these words of Peter: “The fruit of your work grows on other people’s trees.” It gave him permission to remain on the sidelines, offering whatever he could to those who could play the game far better.
Peter once said an individual’s mission statement ought to fit on the front of a T-shirt. Buford chose 100x for his “shirt” because he believes it is his calling to become the “good soil” from which innovative, entrepreneurial church leaders can change the world. This essentially describes Buford’s approach to philanthropy—an approach he would not have arrived at without Peter’s help.
The Bible says that each of us has a life task “prepared beforehand that we should walk in” (St. Paul in Ephesians 2:10). Each one of us has a life task coded into our spiritual DNA.
Many, if not most, serious believers at some level understand what their calling is, but that understanding may be buried under years of busyness and distraction. Yet, that suppressed sense of calling stays with them for years.
People want their lives to count, but they lack two things. First of all, they lack clarity about their calling, which leads to courage and commitment. But they also need encouragement—someone to say, “You can do that. Let’s talk about it until it becomes clear.”
Everything Peter did—everything he wrote—came from his deep conviction that a fully functioning society was possible and that we all can play a role in making our world better and more humane.
EPILOGUE: A CATALYST THAT FOSTERED A MOVEMENT
Drucker was interested in the mega-church himself. He once told Forbes magazine that “pastoral mega-churches are surely the most important social phenomenon in American society in the last thirty years.”
About thirty years ago, Buford pioneered Leadership Network and began to influence the influencers. He did this early on with men like Bill Hybels, Rick Warren, and Robert Lewis. Buford sought to find effective leaders who would teach others and then catalyze their skills.
Gifted pastors became effective leaders, resulting in stronger ministries.
President Harry Truman is purported to have once said, “It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.” That epitomized Bob Buford’s approach.
Dr. Ed Stetzer, President of Life Way Research, summed it up when he said, “You may not have known Bob, but he probably influenced you and your church. More importantly, though, he’s chosen to be a catalyst for kingdom impact—and I’m thankful for his passion and investment to that end.”