Peter Drucker has moved on. Father of modern management. Philosopher to the business world. The man who saw tomorrow and the day after. He was the most prolific most impactful writer on management – spanning decades. In all this, his greatness leaves behind a vacuum that will be difficult to fill up anytime soon. We will miss him for a very long time and we will miss him for many things.
First and foremost, we will miss him for his simplicity. It is a fact that, with all the wisdom of the world, it took this man to tell us for the first time that people are the most important resource of the corporation? Imagine, in the middle of the last century, the world of business had not realized that simple fact! It was capital, not people that was centre stage. It was capital, not thinking human beings who determined productivity, differentiation, profits and all that the world of business is made up of. The day Peter Drucker said that we have just missed the exit, the whole world changed. That simple sentence went on to define the basic tenet of enterprise. Where did the man get his simplicity from?
For this Austrian journalist turned business philosopher, it was something he came gifted with. All of us who have ever tried to be simple, know how difficult it can be. Yet, the most profound things in life are so simple, they invariably escape us. Consider this: Drucker said that most of us, much of the time are trying to 'solve' problems. He went onto say that most problems in life cannot be solved. You can only stay ahead of them. Too often, leadership gets so focused on solving problems, that in reality, it begins to feed them and in the process it starves the opportunities that may actually be just sitting out there. If you look at the history of our own civilization, if you look at points of triumphs in our own lives, you would find that disproportionate progress has always been the child of chasing an opportunity as against feeding a problem.
Drucker said, today's organizations completely underestimate the power of volunteerism. In reality, most organizations do not understand the concept and have never harnessed this important aspect of people's innate capability to achieve. If we look at the history of humanity again, we would find that the greatest achievements, the most pervasive and impacting acts, have always been acts of volunteerism. From the Indian freedom movement to the spread of religions to the greatest acts of discovery and innovation – people have always given their best whenever it has come from within. True involvement and sustained impact are neither dictated by the system, nor is a Pavlovian response to material gratification.
Drucker's thought on volunteerism becomes even more profound in the digitally integrated world in which increasingly, oversight must be replaced by self-regulation in every which field. As that new reality unfolds, would organizations just pray that it works in their favor? Or, do they have to eat a different breakfast so that they do not get disenfranchised by the worker of the future? It is the worker of the future who would decide what to give to the organization, in what measure. If the organization lays down the service level agreement (SLA), it would get back only that much. So, how do leaders of tomorrow make sure that people contribute the productivity, the differentiation and the profits to help the organization stay ahead? Material incentives, said Drucker, work only in good times.
More than ever before, we will hear about value centered workplace with the emergence of the volunteer worker. Drucker said, it is values that save us from breaking apart. To him, any form of growth is inherently destructive. All growth is a tussle between centripetal forces that want to hold on to the core versus centrifugal forces that want to explore the extremities. The key issue for leaders therefore becomes, how do you grow? It was Drucker who said, forget all management. Look at Mother Nature. After all, no one has ever handled growth, the way she has. For instance, when she needed to create moving beings, she found out the most optimal way of doing it right. She figured out that moving beings should be symmetric at the poles. Thereafter, she kept the concept of "polar symmetry" as a constant and changed everything else around it. Using the principle of polar symmetry, she created the two legged human being, countless four legged animals and even the centipede! "What", asks Drucker, "is polar symmetry for organizations?" It is values. If we keep values constant, we can grow without breaking apart. It is true of the family, the society, the corporation and even the government itself.
Drucker was not without his critics. There have always been people who said that he would often retrofit theory to deliver his simplistic views. There have been people who have been cynical of his concern for the larger good – often suspecting populism as his driver. But the truth is, no one has been able to come close enough, no one has been able to deliver a credible alternative to all that he stood for. His work remains a collective treasure of mankind. He, a towering statesman and a philosopher our world will miss for a long, long time.
