Joe’s Journal: Innovation vs. Revolution

Here is the latest post by Joseph A. Maciariello featured in the Joe’s Journal series at the Drucker Exchange (Dx) sponsored by the Drucker Institute. The Drucker Exchange (the Dx) is a platform for bettering society through effective management and responsible leadership. It is produced by the Drucker Institute, a think tank and action tank based at Claremont Graduate University that was established to advance the ideas and ideals of Peter F. Drucker, the father of modern management.

To check out a wealth of resources and subscribe to its online newsletter, please click here.

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“‘Revolutions’ every generation, as was recommended by Thomas Jefferson, are not the solution. We know that ‘revolution’ is not achievement and the new dawn. It results from senile decay, from the bankruptcy of ideas and institutions, from a failure of self-renewal. The only way in which an institution—whether a government, a university, a business, a labor union, an army—can maintain continuity is by building systematic, organized innovation into its very structure. Institutions, systems, policies, eventually outlive themselves, as do products, processes and services. They do it when they accomplish their objectives, and they do it when they fail to accomplish their objectives. Innovation and entrepreneurship are thus needed in society as much as in the economy, in public service institutions as much as in business. The modern organization must be a destabilizer; it must be organized for innovation.”

—Peter F. Drucker

Thomas Jefferson did indeed believe that revolution was necessary every generation to cure society of tyrannical abuses. But what Peter Drucker knew is that revolutions are often unpredictable in the course they take and can easily lead to ugly outcomes.

In Drucker’s early years in Europe, revolutions led to totalitarianism in Germany, Russia and Italy. And even now, a year after the revolution in Egypt, the outcome is very uncertain. It may turn out ugly for other Arab states, the U.S. and Israel.

What’s needed are both the destabilizing influence of innovators and the virtuous leader who seeks continuity in organizations in the midst of destabilizing change.  Systematic innovation and effective leadership are topics that go hand in hand in Drucker’s work.

As we look at the most recent economic meltdown, there were numerous genuine financial innovations in the housing market, but there was also a notable absence of virtuous leaders in key governmental agencies, lending institutions and individual households.

I have thought long and hard about the issues Drucker raised in this passage because they go to the core of his methodology and vision. Some of that thinking is reflected in my remarks for the Orange Coast TEDx event last May. I welcome your comments on this important topic.

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Joseph A. Maciariello is the Horton Professor of Management & Director of Research and Education, The Drucker Institute. You can contact him directly at joseph.maciariello@cgu.edu.

Joe’s Journal: Where the Brotherhood of Intellectuals Meets Money-Grubbing Reality

Here is the latest post by Joseph A. Maciariello featured in the Joe’s Journal series at the Drucker Exchange (Dx) sponsored by the Drucker Institute. The Drucker Exchange (the Dx) is a platform for bettering society through effective management and responsible leadership. It is produced by the Drucker Institute, a think tank and action tank based at Claremont Graduate University that was established to advance the ideas and ideals of Peter F. Drucker, the father of modern management.

To check out a wealth of resources and subscribe to its online newsletter, please click here.

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“In his 1943 novel, published in English as Magister Ludi (1949), Hermann Hesse anticipated the sort of world the humanists want—and its failure. The book depicts a brotherhood of intellectuals, artists and humanists who live a life of splendid isolation, dedicated to the Great Tradition, its wisdom and its beauty. But the hero, the most accomplished Master of the Brotherhood, decides in the end to return to the polluted, vulgar, turbulent, strife-torn, money-grubbing reality—for his values are only fool’s gold unless they have relevance to the world. Post-capitalist society needs the educated person even more than any earlier society did, and access to the great heritage of the past will have to be an essential element. But liberal education must enable the person to understand reality and master it.”

– Peter F. Drucker

Peter Drucker is making the case in this passage for what constitutes an “educated person” in the knowledge society, and for Servant Leadership, an application of values emanating out of the Great Tradition to the world of work.

Drucker called management a liberal art, and claimed that it could liberate the humanities that have been in decline in American universities. The result has been a move away from majors in the humanities to majors in business and other “applied disciplines.” But the educated person clearly requires both.

My co-author, Karen Linkletter, and I wrote the book Drucker’s Lost Art of Management to make the case that management is indeed a liberal art. Our case was developed from a close read of the methodology employed by Drucker and the ends he sought. He was educated both formally and informally in the classical tradition, and his doctorate was in international law—professional training infused with the liberal arts.

Drucker applied his brilliance “to the polluted, vulgar, turbulent, strife-torn, money-grubbing reality” of developing a society of functioning organizations, where leaders act as servants of their organizations and of society. He said it beautifully in a 2004 radio interview with Tom Ashbrook:

“I see functioning societies as a bulwark against the threat of totalitarianism, and they depend on management for their performance. The present tendency to look at management by itself is nonsense. Management exists for the sake of an organization. It is the servant of the organization. And any management that forgets that is mismanagement and will lead their organization down pretty fast—misleaders destroy their organization. Management and administrators are servants.”

Servant Leadership has a long tradition that has been made popular by Robert Greenleaf’s 1970 book, Servant Leadership. Drucker and Greenleaf were good friends, and while Greenleaf was a moralist, Drucker was a pragmatist. Yet Drucker’s classical education in the liberal arts led him to what his friend Theodore Levitt called Drucker’s “deep preoccupation with morality.” Here we see the convergence of Drucker’s work promoting Servant Leadership and his training in the Great Tradition.

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Joseph A. Maciariello is the Horton Professor of Management & Director of Research and Education, The Drucker Institute. You can contact him directly at joseph.maciariello@cgu.edu.

 

Joe’s Journal: Where the Brotherhood of Intellectuals Meets Money-Grubbing Reality

Here is the latest post by Joseph A. Maciariello featured in the Joe’s Journal series at the Drucker Exchange (Dx) sponsored by the Drucker Institute. The Drucker Exchange (the Dx) is a platform for bettering society through effective management and responsible leadership. It is produced by the Drucker Institute, a think tank and action tank based at Claremont Graduate University that was established to advance the ideas and ideals of Peter F. Drucker, the father of modern management.

To check out a wealth of resources and subscribe to its online newsletter, please click here.

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“In his 1943 novel, published in English as Magister Ludi (1949), Hermann Hesse anticipated the sort of world the humanists want—and its failure. The book depicts a brotherhood of intellectuals, artists and humanists who live a life of splendid isolation, dedicated to the Great Tradition, its wisdom and its beauty. But the hero, the most accomplished Master of the Brotherhood, decides in the end to return to the polluted, vulgar, turbulent, strife-torn, money-grubbing reality—for his values are only fool’s gold unless they have relevance to the world. Post-capitalist society needs the educated person even more than any earlier society did, and access to the great heritage of the past will have to be an essential element. But liberal education must enable the person to understand reality and master it.”

– Peter F. Drucker

Peter Drucker is making the case in this passage for what constitutes an “educated person” in the knowledge society, and for Servant Leadership, an application of values emanating out of the Great Tradition to the world of work.

Drucker called management a liberal art, and claimed that it could liberate the humanities that have been in decline in American universities. The result has been a move away from majors in the humanities to majors in business and other “applied disciplines.” But the educated person clearly requires both.

My co-author, Karen Linkletter, and I wrote the book Drucker’s Lost Art of Management to make the case that management is indeed a liberal art. Our case was developed from a close read of the methodology employed by Drucker and the ends he sought. He was educated both formally and informally in the classical tradition, and his doctorate was in international law—professional training infused with the liberal arts.

Drucker applied his brilliance “to the polluted, vulgar, turbulent, strife-torn, money-grubbing reality” of developing a society of functioning organizations, where leaders act as servants of their organizations and of society. He said it beautifully in a 2004 radio interview with Tom Ashbrook:

“I see functioning societies as a bulwark against the threat of totalitarianism, and they depend on management for their performance. The present tendency to look at management by itself is nonsense. Management exists for the sake of an organization. It is the servant of the organization. And any management that forgets that is mismanagement and will lead their organization down pretty fast—misleaders destroy their organization. Management and administrators are servants.”

Servant Leadership has a long tradition that has been made popular by Robert Greenleaf’s 1970 book, Servant Leadership. Drucker and Greenleaf were good friends, and while Greenleaf was a moralist, Drucker was a pragmatist. Yet Drucker’s classical education in the liberal arts led him to what his friend Theodore Levitt called Drucker’s “deep preoccupation with morality.” Here we see the convergence of Drucker’s work promoting Servant Leadership and his training in the Great Tradition.

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Joseph A. Maciariello is the Horton Professor of Management & Director of Research and Education, The Drucker Institute. You can contact him directly at joseph.maciariello@cgu.edu.

Joe’s Journal: On Tyranny and the Organization (Part 2)

Here is the latest post by Joseph A. Maciariello featured in the Joe’s Journal series at the Drucker Exchange (Dx) sponsored by the Drucker Institute. The Dx is a platform for bettering society through effective management and responsible leadership. It is produced by the Drucker Institute, a think tank and action tank based at Claremont Graduate University that was established to advance the ideas and ideals of Peter F. Drucker, the father of modern management. To check out a wealth of resources and subscribe to its online newsletter, please click here.

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“Tyranny substitutes one absolute boss for the pluralism of competing institutions….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 pluralist society of institutions. Performing, responsible management is the alternative to tyranny and our only protection against it.” Peter F. Drucker

This quote from Peter Drucker picks right up from my last Joe’s Journal entry, and underscores how Drucker’s lifework was devoted to producing a pluralistic society of competing, functioning organizations to prevent the tyranny of totalitarianism.

If private-sector organizations devote themselves to building institutions that generate wealth, and do so in a socially responsible way; if government evaluates its programs against predetermined objectives and abandons those programs that no longer perform to make room for others that are socially desirable; and if social-sector organizations establish missions that commit the institution to changing lives for the better, we will have something approaching a functioning society of pluralistic organizations that Drucker discusses in this passage.

This, of course, will never be easy to accomplish. There will always be special-interest groups whose motivations will be at odds with public priorities. There will always be private-sector organizations that violate the interests of society. And social sector organizations will always face the temptation to “do good” rather than to achieve results in an effective way.

Drucker seemed most optimistic, however, about the chances of the social sector. And I share that optimism. I am encouraged, in particular, by how many of our young people are devoting their lives to organizations that are seeking to change the lives of others, and to make our society better.

Young people must contend with economic conditions that recent generations of Americans have not had to contend with. The American Dream, as we have known it, may not be so easily reached by our children. But maybe significance is, in part, replacing traditional measures of success and redefining the definition of the American Dream. Let us hope so.

I wish each of you a Happy New Year.

Joe Maciariello

Joe’s Journal: On Tyranny and the Organization

Here is the latest post by Joseph A. Maciariello featured in the Joe’s Journal series at the Drucker Exchange (Dx) sponsored by the Drucker Institute. The Dx is a platform for bettering society through effective management and responsible leadership. It is produced by the Drucker Institute, a think tank and action tank based at Claremont Graduate University that was established to advance the ideas and ideals of Peter F. Drucker, the father of modern management. To check out a wealth of resources and subscribe to its online newsletter, please click here.

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Man in his social and political existence must have a functioning society just as he must have air to breathe in his biological existence. However, the fact that man has to have a society does not necessarily mean that he has it. Nobody calls the mass of unorganized, panicky, stampeding humanity in a shipwreck a ‘society.’ There is no society, though there are human beings in a group. Actually, the panic is directly due to the breakdown of a society; and the only way to overcome it is by restoring a society with social values, social discipline, social power and social relationships. Social life cannot function without a society; but it is conceivable that it does not function at all. The evidence of the last 25 years of Western civilization hardly entitles us to say that our social life functioned so well as to make out a prima-facie case for the existence of a functioning society.” – Peter F. Drucker

This passage, from Drucker’s 1942 book The Future of Industrial Man, was published in the midst of World War II. It is looking back to a period when the institutions of society had broken down, making way for totalitarian governments in Germany, Russia and Italy. The cry from the people was for security and relief from chaotic economic conditions that included the twin evils of unemployment and inflation. The dictators promised security, and the people accepted totalitarianism as a price for that promise. But Drucker did not believe totalitarianism was the answer to the dysfunctions. Rather, he saw the answers in strong, functioning institutions led by executives with integrity.

He made this case later, in the preface to the hardcover edition of his 1973 book Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices: “If the institutions of our pluralistic society of institutions do not perform in responsible autonomy, we will not have individualism and a society in which there is a chance for people to fulfill themselves. We will instead impose on ourselves complete regimentation in which no one will be allowed autonomy… Tyranny is the only alternative to strong, performing autonomous institutions…It substitutes terror for responsibility.”

Sometime later, I noticed that this passage was dropped from the paperback edition of the book. At a dinner party for a visiting professor from Tel Aviv, I asked Drucker if he still believed in what he’d written. He said yes, and surprised me by adding that the passage was edited out of the new edition to shorten the book some. What an incredible edit! The heart of Peter Drucker’s book was taken out!

Then on November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall came down. That evening, our faculty met at a social gathering. Remembering that Drucker predicted the fall of Communism in his book The New Realities, which was released earlier that year, I asked him as he was coming up the stairs with his cane, “Peter, what do you think about the Wall?” He smiled broadly. “I knew it was going to happen,” he said. “I just did not know it was going to happen so fast.” May each of us learn these lessons and accept responsibility to keep our organizations, and our people within them, free and performing. – Joe Maciariello

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Joseph A. Maciariello is the Horton Professor of Management & Director of Research and Education, The Drucker Institute. You can contact him directly at joseph.maciariello@cgu.edu.

Joe’s Journal: On Tyranny and the Organization

Here is the latest post by Joseph A. Maciariello featured in the Joe’s Journal series at the Drucker Exchange (Dx) sponsored by the Drucker Institute. The Dx is a platform for bettering society through effective management and responsible leadership. It is produced by the Drucker Institute, a think tank and action tank based at Claremont Graduate University that was established to advance the ideas and ideals of Peter F. Drucker, the father of modern management.

To check out a wealth of resources and subscribe to its online newsletter, please click here.

*     *     *
“Man in his social and political existence must have a functioning society just as he must have air to breathe in his biological existence. However, the fact that man has to have a society does not necessarily mean that he has it. Nobody calls the mass of unorganized, panicky, stampeding humanity in a shipwreck a ‘society.’ There is no society, though there are human beings in a group. Actually, the panic is directly due to the breakdown of a society; and the only way to overcome it is by restoring a society with social values, social discipline, social power and social relationships.

“Social life cannot function without a society; but it is conceivable that it does not function at all. The evidence of the last 25 years of Western civilization hardly entitles us to say that our social life functioned so well as to make out a prima-facie case for the existence of a functioning society.”   – Peter F. Drucker

This passage, from Drucker’s 1942 book The Future of Industrial Man, was published in the midst of World War II. It is looking back to a period when the institutions of society had broken down, making way for totalitarian governments in Germany, Russia and Italy.

The cry from the people was for security and relief from chaotic economic conditions that included the twin evils of unemployment and inflation. The dictators promised security, and the people accepted totalitarianism as a price for that promise. But Drucker did not believe totalitarianism was the answer to the dysfunctions. Rather, he saw the answers in strong, functioning institutions led by executives with integrity.

He made this case later, in the preface to the hardcover edition of his 1973 book Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices: “If the institutions of our pluralistic society of institutions do not perform in responsible autonomy, we will not have individualism and a society in which there is a chance for people to fulfill themselves. We will instead impose on ourselves complete regimentation in which no one will be allowed autonomy… Tyranny is the only alternative to strong, performing autonomous institutions…It substitutes terror for responsibility.”

Sometime later, I noticed that this passage was dropped from the paperback edition of the book. At a dinner party for a visiting professor from Tel Aviv, I asked Drucker if he still believed in what he’d written. He said yes, and surprised me by adding that the passage was edited out of the new edition to shorten the book some. What an incredible edit! The heart of Peter Drucker’s book was taken out!

Then on November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall came down. That evening, our faculty met at a social gathering. Remembering that Drucker predicted the fall of Communism in his book The New Realities, which was released earlier that year, I asked him as he was coming up the stairs with his cane, “Peter, what do you think about the Wall?” He smiled broadly. “I knew it was going to happen,” he said. “I just did not know it was going to happen so fast.”

May each of us learn these lessons and accept responsibility to keep our organizations, and our people within them, free and performing.

– Joe Maciariello

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Joseph A. Maciariello is the Horton Professor of Management & Director of Research and Education, The Drucker Institute. You can contact him directly at joseph.maciariello@cgu.edu.

Here Are Three Drucker Resolutions to Add to Your List

Here is a recent post featured online by the Drucker Exchange (Dx),  a platform for bettering society through effective management and responsible leadership. It is produced by the Drucker Institute, a think tank and action tank based at Claremont Graduate University that was established to advance the ideas and ideals of Peter F. Drucker, the father of modern management.

To check out a wealth of resources and subscribe to its online newsletter, please click here.

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For Peter Drucker, New Year’s resolutions came in August. Or least that’s when he liked to take a look back at the 12 months just gone by.

“I’ve learned to sit down with myself for two weeks in August and review my work over the past year,” Drucker revealed in Managing the Nonprofit Organization. “Where should I concentrate next year so as not only to give my best but also to get the most out of it?

Over this past year, we here at the Drucker Exchange have presented a lot of Drucker’s notable insights on management, economics and politics, among other things. To usher in the coming year, we’d like to review three lesser-trumpeted but highly valuable Drucker tips that readers might consider incorporating into their own resolution lists.

1.    If you’re doing something really well, but it’s not really a fit with your values, ditch it.

“What one does well—even very well—and successfully may not fit with one’s value system,” Drucker wrote, in a passage flagged in Joe’s Journal earlier this year. “I was doing extremely well as a young investment banker in London in the mid-1930s; it clearly fitted my strengths. Yet I did not see myself making a contribution as an asset manager. . . . Despite the continuing Depression, I quit—and it was the right thing to do. Values, in other words, are and should be the ultimate test.”

2.    Never forget that people, including your employees and bosses, often do not get what you’re saying. But talking to people in terms of their experience can help.

“Just as the human ear does not hear sounds above a certain pitch, so does human perception altogether not perceive what is beyond its range of perception,” Drucker noted in Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices. (Misunderstandings were something we asked about early this summer—hoping we’d be understood .) “One can only communicate in the recipient’s language or altogether in his terms. And the terms have to be experience-based. It, therefore, does very little good to try to explain terms to people if the terms are not of their own experience.”

3.    If an inside voice says “whoa there” after you’ve made some decision, then hang on—for a moment, at least.

Drucker said that wise executives know to heed the “inner voice, somewhere in the bowels, that whispers” a warning sound. “Nine times out of 10 the uneasiness turns out to be over some silly detail,” Drucker wrote in The Effective Executive. “But the 10th time one suddenly realizes that one has overlooked the most important fact in the problem, has made an elementary blunder, or has misjudged altogether.” Still, this was no excuse for inaction: “The effective decision-maker does not wait long—a few days, at the most a few weeks.”

What work-related resolutions do you plan for the coming year?

Please join the conversation here and also take the rapid-fire Urtak survey by clicking here.

 

 

How to “Relax the Axe”

Here’s an excerpt from a recent article from the Drucker Exchange (the Dx), an online resource that hosts an ongoing conversation about bettering society through effective management and responsible leadership. It is produced by the Drucker Institute, a think tank and action tank based at Claremont Graduate University that was established to advance and build on the ideas and ideals of Peter F. Drucker, the father of modern management. To learn more about the Dx and the Institute as well as to check out their resources and sign up for a free subscription to its online newsletter, please click here.

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If you’ve got employees who are “seemingly always part of problems instead of solutions,” get rid of ’em—and fast. That’s the word, anyway, from G. Michael Maddock and Raphael Louis Vitón of Maddock Douglas, a firm that consults with companies on innovation.

“You don’t want the victims, nonbelievers, or know-it-alls,” the authors wrote in a recent piece for Bloomberg Businessweek titled “Three Types of People to Fire Immediately.” “It is up to you to make sure they take their anti-innovative outlooks elsewhere.

If Peter Drucker were looking to hand anybody the pink slip, however, our guess is that he’d pick Maddock and Vitón.

Drucker certainly believed in setting high standards, but he often took a dim view of terminations as a way of bringing this about. That’s because all sorts of managerial mistakes can take potentially good workers and turn them into bad ones. So it’s worth answering these questions before wielding the axe:

[Here are three of the questions recommended.]

1. Are your employees buried by trivial meetings and paperwork? “This is not job enrichment,” Drucker warned in Managing For the Future. “It is job impoverishment. It destroys productivity. It saps motivation and morale.

2. Do your employees feel they can go straight to the top, if need be? “Every employee at IBM had the right to go directly to the company’s chief executive officer, that is, to Thomas J. Watson, to complain, to suggest improvements, and to be heard,” Drucker pointed out in The Frontiers of Management.

3. Do your employees understand how what they do fits into the bigger picture? Many fighter-plane factories during World War II had high turnover and bad morale. Then, at one factory, the boss arranged to have a completed plane brought to the plant. “To his amazement, this visit created the most intense excitement among the workers and resulted in an almost unbelievable increase in morale and productive efficiency,” Drucker recalled in Concept of the Corporation.

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To read the complete article, please click here.

G. Michael Maddock is chief executive, and Raphael Louis Vitón is president of Maddock Douglas, an innovation consultancy that helps clients invent, brand, and launch new products, services, and business models. Maddock is author of the upcoming book Brand New: Solving the Innovation Paradox—How Great Brands Invent and Launch New Products, Services, and Business Models (Wiley, April 2011).

 

Joe’s Journal: Focus, Focus, Focus

Here is the latest post by Joseph A. Maciariello featured in the Joe’s Journal series at the Drucker Exchange (Dx) sponsored by the Drucker Institute. The Dx is a platform for bettering society through effective management and responsible leadership. It is produced by the Drucker Institute, a think tank and action tank based at Claremont Graduate University that was established to advance the ideas and ideals of Peter F. Drucker, the father of modern management.

To check out a wealth of resources and subscribe to its online newsletter, please click here.

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“Organizations are special-purpose institutions. They are effective because they concentrate on one task. If you were to go to the American Lung Association and say, ‘Ninety percent of all adult Americans suffer from ingrown toenails; we need your expertise in research, health education, and prevention to stamp out this dreadful scourge,’ you’d get the answer: ‘We are interested only in what lies between the hips and the shoulders.’ That explains why the American Lung Association or the American Heart Association or any of the other organizations in the health field get results.”

–Peter F. Drucker

Peter Drucker is trying to tell us that in social sector organizations, if you do diversify too far away from your mission it destroys the performance capacity. In education, for example, if you compare public schools to parochial schools what you often find is that the public schools are forced under law and regulation to do a number of things that pull them away from their main mission, which is to educate children.

So, private schools are delivering significantly better results now. And sure, there’s some self-selecting that comes from parents applying pressure and paying tuition, but basically the private schools are dedicated to delivering just education and not dealing with all sorts of other social issues.

Schools have gotten distracted. I think we need to get back to minimum levels of literacy, and we need to find ways to help students discern their strengths and to build on the strengths.

I am still not convinced that teaching English as a second language is the right thing to do for the waves of Spanish-speaking immigrants. The reason I’m not convinced is because it seems difficult to make people fluent in two languages (both speaking and writing), and English is a tough language in and of itself. We need to at least get that right since it is the global language. In earlier waves of immigration, people wanted the next generations to learn English and let the old languages go. Of course, Spanish is a little different because of the proximity and connections to family in Spanish-speaking countries.  While it is wonderful to be multilingual, I just worry that ESL teaching is an example of how our schools are being forced to deal with a lot of problems and dynamics that are redirecting them away from getting the basics right.

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Joseph A. Maciariello is the Horton Professor of Management & Director of Research and Education, The Drucker Institute. You can contact him directly at joseph.maciariello@cgu.edu.

 

Joe’s Journal: On Realists vs. Cynics

Here is the latest post by Joseph A. Maciariello featured in the Joe’s Journal series at the Drucker Exchange (Dx) sponsored by the Drucker Institute. The Drucker Exchange (the Dx) is a platform for bettering society through effective management and responsible leadership. It is produced by the Drucker Institute, a think tank and action tank based at Claremont Graduate University that was established to advance the ideas and ideals of Peter F. Drucker, the father of modern management.

To check out a wealth of resources and subscribe to its online newsletter, please click here.

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“Integrity may be difficult to define, but what constitutes lack of integrity is of such seriousness as to disqualify a person for a managerial position. A person should never be appointed to a managerial position if his vision focuses on people’s weaknesses rather than on their strengths. The person who always knows exactly what people cannot do, but never sees anything they can do, will undermine the spirit of her organization. An executive should be a realist; and no one is less realistic than the cynic.

A person should not be appointed if that person is more interested in the question ‘Who is right?’ than in the question ‘What is right?’ Management . . . should never promote a person who has shown that he or she is afraid of strong subordinates. It should never put into a management job a person who does not set high standards for his or her own work.”

–Peter F. Drucker

This reminds me of Peter Drucker’s foreword to Bob Greenleaf’s book Servant Leadership. Drucker said in that piece that he and Greenleaf shared the same basic beliefs and values, but they went about their work very differently. Bob was always out to change the individual, to make him or her into a different person. Greenleaf was a moralist, Drucker said. But Drucker was a pragmatist; he was interested in consequences and actions. He was more concerned with behavior and practices and not so interested in ideas of “good” and “bad.”

Of course, the world needs both types of people. It needs a Socrates, and Bob was truly a wise man. Drucker was more like the Sophists. He said, “I only know that I’m not as effective a preacher as I am a teacher, and the two are very different.”

Integrity is difficult to define. For Drucker, integrity had moral roots, but he was less concerned with the moral roots and more concerned with actions. He was concerned with what happens to people in their everyday lives, in the workplace and so on.

In this passage he discusses some practices that help to create the best opportunities for effective leadership and work. This is really interesting to me. He said that management should appoint people who have high standards for their own work because they serve as examples; their personal characteristics and their work ethic guide others’ choices.

He went on to say that an executive should be a realist, but that it is different than being a cynic. When you’re cynical about people, you are cynical about what they can do and what they can be—and you’re cynical about the kind of practices you can expect of them.

Drucker essentially suggested that the real mark of integrity is how people behave when faced with pressure or temptation. I actually think the formation of character is a lifelong process. Drucker came to think so, too.

– Joe Maciariello

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Joseph A. Maciariello is the Horton Professor of Management & Director of Research and Education, The Drucker Institute. You can contact him directly at joseph.maciariello@cgu.edu.
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