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Wally Bock's Supervisory Leadership Tips Leadership Wisdom from Peter Drucker
Peter Drucker died November 11, 2005, shortly before his 96th birthday. Of all of the writers who have ever written about management and leadership, Drucker was almost certainly the most influential.
Many of the things that Drucker said first have become common wisdom. He was the most lucid writer I've ever encountered and his books and articles are riddled with insights great and small. Rather than try to do him justice with my words, I'll use this space to share some of my favorite Peter Drucker quotes.
"Successful leaders don't start out asking, 'What do I want to do?' They ask, 'What needs to be done?' Then they ask, 'Of those things that would make a difference, which are right for me?'"
"Too many leaders try to do a little bit of 25 things and get nothing done. They are very popular because they always say yes. But they get nothing done."
"One either meets or one works."
"The only things that evolve by themselves in an organization are disorder, friction and malperformance."
"Reports tell you what your subordinates want you to know."
"If there is one thing that most of the people I know in management have to learn it is how to handle relationships where there is no authority and no orders."
"No executive has ever suffered because his subordinates were strong and effective."
"We know only two things about the future: It cannot be known. It will be different from what exists now and from what we now expect."
"The most serious mistakes are not being made as a result of wrong answers. The truly dangerous thing is asking the wrong question."
"There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all."
"Power and authority are two different things. Management has no power. Management has only responsibility."
"Strategic planning does not deal with future decisions. It deals with the futurity of present decisions."
"Strategic planning is necessary precisely because we cannot forecast."
"Leadership is not magnetic personality--that can just as well be a glib tongue. It is not 'making friends and influencing people'--that is flattery. Leadership is lifting a person's vision to higher sights, the raising of a person's performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations."
"Effective leadership is not about making speeches or being liked; leadership is defined by results not attributes."
Peter Drucker published at least thirty books over a career that was almost as long as two average working lives. He began with books that were political, but with the publication of "The Concept of the Corporation" in 1946 he began to define the profession of management.
For the next thirty years he wrote about the work that managers do and how we can do it better. The last thirty years brought us books that primarily dealt with the changes in the world, the corporation and other organizations, and the practice of management itself.
My recommendations come from the middle period. They are the books I'm most likely to re-read, the ones I think are most likely to yield timeless wisdom that helps me do my work more effectively.
The first Peter Drucker book I ever read was "Managing for Results." It laid out the challenges that I faced as a new manager with lucid precision. It was far better written than any other management book I had ever seen. It helped me think differently about my work and become more effective.
Drucker's magnum opus from this period is "Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, and Practices," published about a decade after "Managing for Results." It is a huge doorstop of a book, but one filled with wisdom. I see it as the summing up of Drucker's thought on what it takes to manage effectively.
Between those two books came "The Effective Executive." This is not just the best of Drucker's books; it is the best management book ever. Out of all the thousands of management books that have been published, this is the one to have if you can only have one and the one to return to most often if can have thousands of others.
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