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The Man who saw Tomorrow
By Anoop K Menon
Among this millennium’s most popular catchphrases, surely ‘Knowledge Worker’ ranks among the top 10. A knowledge worker is one whose primary task is interpretation, translation and problem solving, requiring the use of gray matter rather than muscles. But if you thought ‘Knowledge Worker’ is a 21st century invention, you are off the mark by at least 50 years.
Peter Drucker, the man credited with inventing the discipline of management as it is practised today, coined the term in his usual way of anticipating things decades ahead before anyone truly understood what he was talking about. Drucker anticipated a different breed of worker, one motivated by pride, accomplishment and professional association.
In 1942, he wrote that institutions, and not nations, states or other geographically-defined entities, were the most important communities. Today, of the 100 largest economic entities of the world, as measured by GDP / revenue, 44 are countries and 56 are companies. In 1954 he told his publisher that ‘management needs strategy; by 1975, the topic of strategy dominated management writings and books.
When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Drucker, who had predicted four years earlier that the wall would eventually fall, joked that he didn’t know it would happen so soon. In fact, Michael Hammer, the author of Re-engineering the Corporation and a Drucker fan, admits that it is with some trepidation that he opens Drucker’s early books because he is afraid to discover that Drucker may have anticipated some of his ideas by several decades.
The Definitive Drucker by Elizabeth Haas Edersheim isn’t a conventional biography of Peter Drucker as the father of modern management, or his life. Rather, it is a biography of his ideas, of his vision and his theories. Haas has successfully captured not only the essence of Drucker’s 39 books and seven decades of discovery and insight in this book’s 260 pages, but she has also captured the essence of Drucker the man who emphasized the human element in management for the first time, who liberated people by asking questions and eliciting a vision that felt just right, and who inspired leaders of the likes of Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher, Akio Morita of Sony and Bill Gates of Microsoft.
Drucker believed that the first thing in creating tomorrow is to build a picture that reflects one’s understanding of the environment. Chapter 1 covers the first part of this vehicle for creating tomorrow; it outlines the role of management and strategy in this new world where strategy is more important than ownership. Chapter 2 deals with the customer, the steering wheel of this vehicle. A close connection with the customer helps the enterprise to look at the world from the outside, where customer needs develop and business results are achieved, to the inside, which must mobilize to meet these needs and achieve the results. Chapters 3-5 deal with the fundamentals needed on the journey, or the wheels of the vehicle: innovation and abandonment, collaboration, people and knowledge. Chapter 6 deals with decision mechanisms, discipline and values that connect the fundamentals or the vehicle’s chassis. The concluding chapter addresses the role of the CEO. Drucker always liked to say that each of us is his or her own CEO, and this belief is discussed in detail.
Drucker’s understanding of the interdependency of the world’s economic systems, and the enormous human cost of failure, is even more relevant in today’s global economy. Read this book to understand how.
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