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Drucker in December

Tooling & Production, Dec 2006 by McKenna, Joseph F

December is a good time to visit Professor Drucker. Not only is the end of the year an appropriate time to review your successes and your setbacks of the year, but it is also the perfect time to prepare for your role as a contributor during '07. No one is better qualified to guide you toward a successful new year than Peter F. Drucker - even if only through his remarkable writing.

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As longtime readers of Tooling & Production know, the late "father of modern management" has made many an appearance on our pages. In 1998, then-editor Stan Modic reminded all of us that the Viennese-born polymath had "invented the word management." Back in 2000, in our special "Manufacturing in the New Millennium" issue, Drucker himself cautioned that "a change leader sees change as opportunity. A change leader looks for change, knows how to find the right changes, and knows how to make them effective both outside the organization and inside it." And after his death at 95 in November 2004, in a special editorial tribute, T&P reminded readers that Drucker left "a legacy of ideas that helped to underpin leadership from the production floor to the executive suite."

As far as I'm concerned, his greatest legacy is The Effective Executive. Though Drucker wrote a broad shelf's worth of books, including fiction. The Effective Executive remains his seminal contribution. No matter what position you hold, you can't help but benefit from the short text whose subtitle tells it all - The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done.

From the start, Drucker makes it clear where he plans to take his reader. "The subject of this book," he writes, "is managing oneself for effectiveness. That one can truly manage other people is by no means adequately proven. But one can always manage oneself."

Writing to the "knowledge worker" - a category that fits just about anyone in 21st century metalworking - Drucker makes clear that getting things done efficiently is not the same things as getting the right things done. Moreover, he dispels any idea that there's a natural-born executive type. Instead, he asserts that effectiveness - the ability to be "responsible for actions and decisions which are meant to contribute to the performance capacity of his organization" - is a habit, "that is, a complex of practices. And practices can always be learned."

With that concept firmly established, Drucker expands on the five "habits of the mind" that executives must acquire:

* Knowing where their time goes;

* Focusing on outward contribution;

* Building on strengths - their own and others;

* Concentrating "on the few major areas where superior performance will produce outstanding results"; and

* Making effective, fundamental decisions.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, himself a public man with a broad intellectual grasp, has praised this Drucker book as the one that changed his life. He has encouraged people to read The Effective Executive and then take it up once a year for at least five vears. Good advice.

"Drucker, like Adam Smith, is essentially a philosopher of reality," Gingrich wrote in Inc. magazine in 1998. "He looks at what is really happening in the market in economic, historical, and political terms, and then he makes sense of it all. Drucker's work is about far more than management or the production of wealth. It is about the process by which people lead productive and useful lives and produce greater opportunities and greater resources for themselves and their fellow man."

Before this month slips away and you find yourself with a New Year's pile of new challenges, go seek out the Good Professor Drucker. It will be your most effective resolution going into '07.

Joseph F. McKenna

Editor-in-Chief

Drucker in December

Tooling & Production, Dec 2006 by McKenna, Joseph F

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