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: 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

The Capitalist Philosophers A book review by Bob Morris

The Capitalist Philosophers: The Geniuses of Modern Business–Their Lives, Times, and Ideas
Andrea Gabor
Times Business (2000)

A brilliant discussion of thirteen “geniuses of modern business”

While preparing questions for another interview, I recently re-read this book (published in 2000) in which Andrea Gabor focuses on Frederick Winslow Taylor, Mary Parker Follett, Chester Barnard, Fritz Roethlisberger and Elton Mayo, Robert McNamara, Abraham Maslow and Douglas McGregor, W. Edwards Deming, Herbert A. Simon, Alfred Du Pont Chandler and Alfred Sloan, and Peter F. Drucker. And frankly, until reading this book, I knew little (if anything) about Follett, Mayo, Simon, and Chandler and thus was especially eager to understand why Gabor included them with the others.

Also of special interest to me is how skillfully Gabor uses several themes that lend cohesion to the provision of her narrative. For example, she notes “the seemingly irreconcilable visions of management – the scientific and humanistic – that have battled fort hegemony both in the corporate workplace and in American society itself.” Gabor traces the development of both the scientific and humanistic traditions from the beginning of the 20th century and follows the battle of ideologies up to the present, 2000. A related theme involves various responses to this question: “What is the purpose of the business organization in American society?” Is it a “pivotal institution of democracy” with complex responsibilities to a host of constituencies (e.g. employees, customers, and the community) or is there “one primary corporate constituent – the shareholder – and a single purpose – profit making”?

Here in Dallas, we have a Farmers Market at which several vendors offer free slices of fresh fruit as samples. Following their example, I now provide a representative selection of brief excerpts from Gabor’s book to suggest the “flavor” of her analysis and writing style.

“Taylor’s greatest contribution was in recognizing that scientific method was the key to the success of industrialization, especially in running the new enterprises that were of a scale and scope heretofore unimaginable – factories so large they used small railroads to transport men around them, factories peopled by thousands of workers operating enormous, power-driven machines.” (Page 5)

“Although Barnard did not refer specifically to the notion of corporate culture, he recognized that the values of an organization reside in the informal organization. He saw that formal organizations generate `customs, mores, folklore, institutions, social norms, and ideals’ – in short culture. They are also a key to communication, which Barnard identified as one of the most important functions of the executive.” (Page 79)

Abraham Maslow coined the term `Eupsychia’ [introduced in his book Eupsychian Management and later reissued as Maslow on Management] to define a `culture that would be generated by 1,000 self-actualizing people on a sheltered island’ and help answer the questions that defined his core preoccupation: `how good a society does human nature permit?’ In the words of Warren Bennis, Maslow approached his material `like a swashbuckling Candide, that is with a powerful innocence that is both threatening and receptive to widely held beliefs.’” (Page 182)

Note: “eupsychia” was Maslow’s term for the ideal society or organization.

The importance of Deming’s philosophy to the information age “was its radical break with many accepted tenets of management: its insistence on constant change and flexibility, its implicit faith in the ability of individuals and the informal organization to generate new ideas, its opposition to hierarchy and its trappings, and its assumption that the greatest competitive advantage could accrue to companies that help employees achieve their full potential.” (Page 211)

“No revolutionary, Drucker is an apostle of great corporations. His great strength is his ability to absorb vast amounts of information, to see patterns in what would appear as a jumble of chaotic events, trends, and economic indicators, and to anticipate – and articulate – each new zeitgeist. His life is also a testament to the American Dream, the ability of an enterprising immigrant both to succeed in his adopted country and to reinvent t himself.” (Page 293

Those who share my high regard for this book are urged to check out Art Kleiner’s The Age of Heretics (Second Edition), Joan Magretta’s What Management Is: How It Works and Why It’s Everyone’s Business, Edgar H. Schein’s Organizational Culture and Leadership, Stuart Crainer’s The Management Century, and two books by Chris Argyris: Integrating the Individual and the Organization and Knowledge for Action: A Guide to Overcoming Barriers to Organizational Change.

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.

 

 

When It Isn’t Just Business

Here is 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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Ever since Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble partnered up and launched an ill-fated private detective business, negotiating personal relationships within a work setting has proven tricky. The latest evidence comes in the form of a resignation by Liam Fox, Britain’s defense secretary. Fox resigned, according to a recent Wall Street Journal, “amid an intensifying controversy” over a friend who was alleged to have acted as an unofficial adviser.

“Mr. Fox’s relationship with Adam Werritty has been under intense scrutiny in recent days,” the Journal reported, “after the defense minister acknowledged that his former housemate and best man at his wedding attended several official meetings and used a business card that described himself as an adviser—a role he doesn’t hold.” Fox, for his part, conceded that he’d allowed his personal and business interests “to become blurred.”

Peter Drucker well understood the power of workplaces to create a sense of community—and to foster friendship. “Work, since time immemorial, has been the means to satisfy man’s need for belonging to a group and for a meaningful relationship to others of his kind,” Drucker wrote in Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Challenges. “A man can work very well with somebody whom he never sees away from the job, and for whom he feels neither friendship nor warmth nor liking. . . . But the fellow worker can also be a close friend with whom one spends as many hours away from work as possible, with whom one goes hunting or fishing, spends one’s vacation, spends one’s evenings, and shares much of one’s life.”

Where Drucker drew the line, however, was in the realm of superiors becoming too chummy with subordinates. “Men who build first-class executive teams are not usually close to their immediate colleagues and subordinates,” Drucker noted in The Effective Executive. “Picking people for what they can do rather than on personal likes or dislikes, they seek performance, not conformance. To insure this outcome, they keep a distance between themselves and their close colleagues.”

The quintessential example of an executive who maintained such a distance was Alfred Sloan, the longtime head of General Motors. “Sloan had no friends within the GM group,” Drucker wrote. “He never invited them to his home. Unless it was a business meeting with a clear business agenda, he did not even sit down to a meal with any of them. He never accepted an invitation to any of their homes, even on business trips to their hometowns.” To be a chief executive, Sloan felt, was “incompatible with friendship and social relations.”

 

 

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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Joe’s Journal: On Success and Creative Destruction

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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“Success always obsoletes the very behavior that achieved it. It always creates new realities. It always creates, above all, its own and different problems. It is not easy for the management of a successful company to ask, ‘What is our business?’ Everybody in the company thinks that the answer is so obvious as not to deserve discussion. It is never popular to argue with success, never popular to rock the boat. But the management that does not ask ‘What is our business?’ when the company is successful is, in effect, smug, lazy and arrogant. It will not be long before success will turn into failure.”

–Peter F. Drucker

The economist Joseph Schumpeter, a friend of the Drucker family, was also one of the most significant intellectual influences on the work of Peter Drucker. Schumpeter identified the process of “creative destruction” in market capitalism, a process that is triggered by entrepreneurial activity, which is itself essential for economic development.

Innovation tends to make obsolete the comparative advantages enjoyed by leading organizations, thus causing disruptions to companies and economies. It is hard to predict where the disruption will come from because it can come from inside or outside a specific industry. The products of organizations, therefore, tend to go through life cycles of growth, stagnation and decline represented by an “S” curve.

To survive and prosper, an organization should anticipate this process not only by abandoning unproductive products, processes and services but by rethinking its business when it is near the top of the “S” curve. At that point it has excess resources and can take the “hit” to earnings required to invest in new ventures. The company should ask, “What should our business be?” before the competition forces the company to take a defensive position.

In practice, it is hard to believe we have a problem when all is going well. But, the stubborn facts of competitive life tell us that problems are likely to be right around the corner. We should take preemptive action and innovate, even going so far as to “cannibalize” our successful products and services. For if we do not do this, our competitors will.

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 Measuring Performance

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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“Work implies accountability, a deadline, and finally, the measurement of results, that is, feedback from results on the work. What we measure and how we measure determine what will be considered relevant, and determine, thereby, not just what we see, but what we—and others—do.”

– Peter F. Drucker

In Peter Drucker’s system of management, the “theory of a business” — fundamental notions about customers and competitors, about technology, about a company’s own strengths and weaknesses — is converted into strategies and objectives. But that is not the end of the process. Each objective must then be assigned to a particular organizational unit and then to specific individuals. Objectives are then converted to specific work assignments for which each individual is responsible. Performance is then monitored, and results are compared to objectives. Follow-up is often necessary to ensure desired results.

But what are often ignored are the measurements that are used to evaluate performance of individuals and of organizations. These are managerial controls. And they are powerful in determining behavior.

One must ask if the performance of each person for an objective is included within the system of performance measures used to evaluate and reward the person’s performance. If not, the person will be conflicted—what is measured and rewarded is different than what is expected by the objective. This often happens in organizations, and the result is tension and misdirection. A system of controls (i.e., a management control system) should be designed to help people achieve their individual objectives and to help management achieve overall control and validate its theory of the business.

We have a number of proverbs in the field of control systems that are useful generalizations. At the level of controls or performance measures “you get what you inspect, not what you expect.” Second, the management systems of an organization “are designed perfectly to get the actual results experienced.”  Finally, we often fall into the trap so accurately identified in Steven Kerr’s article “On the Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping for B.” Here people are not rewarded for achieving assigned objectives but for some other behavior. So we’d do well to listen to Drucker’s counsel, articulated above.
We all should avoid the mistake of thinking that controls and control systems are no longer relevant in an age of empowerment. They are always relevant and a point of significant leverage in organizations.

– 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 Turning Failure to Success

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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“Knowledge workers . . . need to develop, preferably while they are still quite young, a noncompetitive life and community of their own, and some serious outside interest. This outside interest will give them the opportunity for personal contribution and achievement beyond the workplace. No one can expect to live very long without experiencing a serious setback in one’s life or in one’s work. There is the competent engineer who at age 42 is being passed over for promotion in the company. The engineer now knows that he has not been very successful in his job. But in his outside activity — for example, as treasurer in his local church — he has achieved success and continues to have success. And, one’s own family may break up, but in that outside activity, there is still a community.”

– Peter F. Drucker

As knowledge workers we are bound to experience failure and serious failure at times. What matters in times of failure is our resolve to pursue, and ultimately accomplish, our mission in life and work. I know of no top executive who experienced more failures in his life than our 16th president, Abraham Lincoln, both in office and prior to it.

His failures were especially pronounced in choosing his top generals during the Civil War. Following each battle that the Union lost, Lincoln, after suffering depression, went right to work to try to figure out what had gone wrong. While there were always underlying causes, he could not turn around the course of the war permanently until he found and tested Ulysses S. Grant, whom he ultimately promoted to lieutenant general and put in charge of Union Armies. Before then, the list of his failures in choosing generals was massive: Winfred Scott, George Halleck, Irvin McDowell, George McClellan twice, John Polk, Ambrose Burnside and Joseph Hooker.

Some of these failures simply reflected the superiority of the legendary generals of the Confederacy, including Robert E. Lee. But most failures were failures of strategy and tactics, which ultimately Lincoln had to devise himself and then find generals to successfully implement. Grant became known as “Unconditional Surrender Grant” because of his relentless pursuit of Confederate troops. Grant’s victories came with a tremendous loss of life on both sides, but this was a conflict so deep that it had to be “tried by war” and “decided by victory.” War, as Lincoln found out, is hell. Tragically, there did not seem to be any other way.

President Lincoln, known for his supreme magnanimity, had to join these instincts with discerning judgment that saved him from becoming sentimental. He provides us as knowledge workers with a tremendous lesson — what Peter Drucker called “feedback analysis”: Failure should be followed up by brutal self-evaluation and used as a steppingstone to success.

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Joe Macieriello

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.