William Cohen - The Practical Drucker: Applying the Wisdom of the Worlds Greatest Management Thinker

T his book consists of wisdom that I learned in the classroom and in personal dialogue with Peter F. Drucker, arguably the greatest management thinker of our time. It also describes how I applied these insights which he so generously imparted. However, this is mostly about me and how I came to my relationship with Peter Drucker. The lessons themselves were received over a thirty-year period, from when I first met Peter Drucker in 1975 until his death in 2005. His management approach continues to be taught at the Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management at Claremont Graduate University. I know that it gave him a great deal of satisfaction and pleasure that his university would continue the legacy of his work both in spirit and practice.

My lessons from Peter ended on November 11th, 2005. It was then that I received a most unwelcome e-mail announcement from Claremont Graduate University regarding this man from whom I learned so much, and who in so many ways changed my life. Peter F. Drucker, The Father of Modern Management, had died peacefully several hours earlier at age of 95, a couple of weeks before his 96th birthday.

While death at an advanced age does not come as a complete surprise, such an announcement cannot come without a profound sense of loss. This is because Peter was who he was and did the things he did, and because he made such major contributions to the lives and thinking of many generations of management practitioners, researchers, thinkers, and students. In my case, I felt this loss especially keenly because it was personal. Until not long prior to his death, I spoke with Peter by telephone often and saw him at least once a year. I was not a campus colleague, except twice when I taught at Claremont Graduate University as a part time adjunct professor. During one such period in the mid-1980's, Peter allowed me to use his office as my own.

Peter Drucker was both my friend and mentor. He was more than a former professor with whom I had studied for my doctorate some thirty years earlier. But I hasten to add that many, perhaps thousands of students and non-students alike felt the same about him. Peter had a gift of making everyone he came into contact with feel as if he or she were an especially close friend. And he seemed to remember and have special affection for his former students. Many maintained contact with him.

The lessons I learned from Peter were extraordinary and significant to my thinking and practice, not just of management, but of life. One of the highest honors I have ever received came as a result of my teaching a challenging course in strategy, planning, and decision-making to a group of doctoral students at CETYS University in Ensenada, Mexico in 2005. One student representing the group was generous enough to say, As you have quoted and furthered the ideas of Peter Drucker, in the future, as we progress in our careers, we will quote you and further your ideas.

In 1973, I had returned from Israel after living and working there for three years. Previous to that, my background was totally in the military, I was even born into a military family. I knew little outside of the military, and less about business and how it was practiced. I did know something about management and how to direct research and development activities since I had done this work in the Air Force and in Israel. Moreover, on my return to the U.S., I had become director of research and development for a company developing and manufacturing life support equipment, primarily for aviators and airplane passengers. This company was located in California, near Los Angeles. As a practicing manager, I decided that I had better learn something about business, so I committed to reading at least one business book every week.

I soon discovered Drucker. I read his classic works such as Concept of the Corporation and The Effective Executive. His book, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, was published the same year as I began as an executive in industry, and I eagerly devoured the thick volume that I would later study as his student.

I received my first Drucker lesson before I even met Peter Drucker. As the senior manager heading up research and development, I attended the company's annual off-site sales conference. One of the items on the agenda was a discussion of a Drucker concept developed in Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices. In this book Peter had written that the first task of any business management was to decide what business it was in. I soon realized that it was not only a profound statement about business: it was true about every endeavor anyone might undertake in life.

Let me explain what I mean. I had at that point recently completed my first-ever job search. A few years later I became a headhunter. Both as a job seeker myself and as a facilitator in this field, I discovered that many job candidates fail to get hired by companies because they don't know what they want to do. They want to keep their options open. Even some managers who have extensive experience in many industries make this mistake. They put together a very general resume which says that they have done many different things in many different areas and for different companies. They promote themselves as a jack of all trades, able to do anything. Unfortunately, their resumes do not emphasize what business they are really in. This comes across as the second part of that old saying and master of none.

As a consequence, not infrequently, a job candidate with a lot less experience who makes it clear by the way his or her experience is presented that this is the one business that the person is really in, is the one who lands the job. This happens even though the candidate's experience in the discipline is frequently far less than the one who tries to be everything to everybody.

The same is true when it comes to managing our time in order to achieve our goals, and Peter was a master time manager. Each of us has the same amount of time, 24 hours a day. But some fritter away and waste their time on work which has no bearing on what they would like to accomplish or where they would like to be one, five, or ten years in the future.