Tag: Peter Drucker

Bruce Rosenstein On Decoding Drucker & Creating Your Future

Wednesday, November 27th, 2013

My friend and colleague (and Laws of Subtraction contributor) Bruce Rosenstein is a prolific writer and editor. He’s Managing Editor of Leader to Leader, author of the wonderful Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life and wrote for USA TODAY for over two decades, from 1987-2008.

Bruce knows more about the most acclaimed management thinker of all time: the late Peter Drucker. He spent many hours with the man, and is both a student and scholar of “the Drucker way.” I’ve read everything Drucker ever wrote, and if there’s one thing I took from his collected works, it’s that he was always ahead of his time. He was on Main Street long before the parade arrived. I would challenge anyone to point to a business or management idea that can’t be traced to Drucker within a few degrees of separation.

But Drucker wasn’t easy to read. And his thoughts weren’t always easy to apply. That’s where Bruce comes in, because he does just that in his new book just out by McGraw-Hill, entitled: Create Your Future the Peter Drucker Way.

I had a few questions for Bruce after I read the book on my recent trip to the Middle East and India…

How do you define a “future-focused mindset” beyond what the term obviously implies…thinking about the future?

Thinking about the future is one component, but not the only one. The idea is to keep the future in mind as you go about your life and work, and factor it into your decisions and choices. So it’s not necessarily thinking about specific things that may or may happen in the future. When your mindset is future-focused, you recognize the necessity of managing your present reality and working toward building a better tomorrow for you and others.

We are notoriously bad about predicting the future…even about how we will feel about a specific event in the future. Why bother with the guesswork?

I agree. We should not guess about the future, and predictions are often faulty. That is why, in the book, I don’t advocate either predicting the future, or guessing about it. But figuring out where the world is heading, based on new knowledge, trends and events that have already happened but where we have not yet seen the full effects, in areas of life and work that potentially have an impact on us, can be quite beneficial.

Can you explain what you mean by “becoming your own successor?” I get the concept of legacy by a portfolio of work, but I’m struggling with self-successorship.

This is an idea of mine that was inspired by Drucker, but it is not his concept. Because I believe that, in the years following his 2005 death at 95, there has been so much additional scholarship about Drucker’s work, in addition to posthumously published material by him, we understand his work in a different, improved and more nuanced way. That makes him, in my estimation, his own successor as the top management guru.

I decided to broaden the concept to have people think of themselves as their own successor. Obviously, this is somewhat metaphorical and it’s hard to read it literally. Here are some possible ways of considering it: athletes breaking their own records; getting a promotion within your own organization, requiring you to think of yourself and your abilities in new ways; staying in your current job but redefining/reinventing it; or leaving your job and taking on something new and challenging in a different realm, also requiring new ways of thinking and acting.

You mention the role of spirituality and religion in creating one’s future. What’s the Drucker perspective on those issues?

Drucker was not particularly overt in a public sense about his specific religious or spiritual beliefs and actions. All indications are that he was privately religious. And there is considerable religious imagery and many references to religion and the Bible in his writing. There have been several scholarly articles published after his death about Drucker and religion. A classic part of his writing about faith, and the need for believing in something beyond the tangible and beyond oneself, is in the essay “The Unfashionable Kierkegaard,” published in 1949 and anthologized in at least two books.

I’m not a theologian or an expert on religion and spirituality, but these subjects hold considerable interest for me, and their intersection with Drucker’s writing was something I felt was perfect to include in the final chapter of the book, “Build Your Future Beyond Your Current Workplace.”

You were fortunate to have spent time with Peter Drucker. In what if any ways did Drucker the man differ from Drucker the management thinker? What was the most personally impactful moment for you?

Drucker the person and Drucker the management thinker were intertwined in a holistic way. Being a management thinker (as well as a thinker about other disciplines), was an inseparable part of his overall being. However, if some readers feel that his writing can at times seem stern, in person I found him to be quite warm, generous, gracious and at times humorous. I was impressed that he answered his own phone, and made his own arrangements for my interviews with him. And as we set up right before the cameras started rolling for an interview on video in 2005, seven months to the day before he died, he put me at ease by saying that during the interview, we should just refer to each other as “Peter and Bruce.”

By most psychological accounts, the Western world is nearly all doers, not thinkers. Drucker was in that small percentage (by some estimates less than 3%) of thinkers. What then do you believe to be the most relevant components of his thinking for a doer world?

My sense of this is that there has to be a lot in common between thinking and doing, and that the former is a necessity for much of the latter, beyond the instinctive. This gets back to his idea of the knowledge worker, a term Drucker coined in the late 1950s. If we are indeed in a doer world, whatever people do should be adequately thought out. A considerable amount of knowledge work may be going on behind the scenes. And though Drucker was a model thinker, he also did and accomplished a lot: regularly writing books and articles, teaching at a school named after him, and consulting for companies, nonprofits, arts institutions and governments. And that was just for his work-related activities.

What has been the most impactful personal or professional practice you have developed or adopted based on a Drucker mindset?

It is tough to choose. But in this case I will cite his idea of ‘living in more than one world,’ a phrase he used in that 2005 interview with me referenced above, and which became the title of my first book. It’s the idea that you have a number of things going on in your life, personally and professionally, for many reasons: meeting and interacting with different people in your different worlds; seeing where these worlds intersect; providing a buffer against setbacks, particularly at work ; and giving you experience and growth opportunities in areas where they may be unavailable elsewhere in your life.

What’s the one thing you want people to take away from this book?

I’d like people  to consider that despite ambiguity, uncertainty and risk, they should still consider the future to be something they can create in the present moment, by their moment to moment, day to day actions, thoughts, commitments and decisions. That if you approach the future in a reasonably systematic, organized way, you can successfully become, as Drucker put it, “organized for change.”

Elegant Solutions No. 4

Tuesday, July 30th, 2013

IDONETHIS

Not until I began working with Toyota many years ago did I pick up the habit of carrying a notebook…for ideas, projections, record keeping, scheduling, reflections, and, well, notetaking. The Japanese manager I was working with never went anywhere without one, and he was constantly writing in it. It was an analog hard drive: he could tell me exactly what we discussed on a given day and time, with uncanny precision.

I developed a hansei (reflection) routine over the years: 5 minutes or so at or near the end of the day for a personal after action review…mostly a “what worked, what didn’t, what next” riff. I taught the discipline to my MBA students, and offered extra credit if they kept a creative journal over the semester and turned it in at the end. Those journals were like a little window into the human creative spirit, and far more interesting then the formal projects they handed in.

My friend Teresa Amabile and her husband/coauthor Steve Karmer used the technique as a research method for their book The Progress Principle (reviewed here and interviewed here).

“The secret to unleashing the creative potential of people,” they wrote, “is to enable them to experience a great inner work life, and the the single most powerful influence on that inner work life is progress in meaningful work. It starts with giving people something meaningful to accomplish. It requires giving clear goals, autonomy, help and resources–what people need to make real progress in their daily work. And it depends on showing respect for ideas and the people who create them.”

The late Peter Drucker highlighted the technique in Management Challenges for the 21st Century, calling it “feedback analysis.” Drucker recommended a personal journal in which you record every key decision you make, and every key action you take, along with your projection of the expected outcome. Months later, you review your performance and satisfaction, feeding back from actual outcomes to expectations. Drucker wrote in 1999, “I have been doing this for some fifteen to twenty years now. And every time I do it I am surprised. And so is everyone who has ever done this.”

This is a long preamble to introducing what I consider an elegant solution: IDoneThis.com. IDoneThis lifts the burden of carrying around a notebook and pen, and incorporates that secret ingredient we all need when we’re buylding discipline: accountability. (Shoutout: Dan Pink introduced me to this little gem.)

idonethisThe premise of IDoneThis could not possibly be any simpler: every day at 6 pm you get a little email reminder to list your “git ‘er dones” for the day. It goes far beyond a simple calendar, which only reveals events, and to-do lists, which by nature we eliminate.

After the first few days, you’ll begin to look forward to those emails. And if you happen to get so jammed you don’t get to it, that little voice of accountability will kick in and you’ll get antsy until you enter your achievements.

You will shock yourself when you sit down to glance over your month, or even a week. Your year-end “major shipping list” will be a snap to product. It’s a great way to put The Progress Principle in play. It’s a great way to keep a transparent dashboard of a team’s accomplishments in near real-time…IDoneThis trumps traditional periodic status reports (which most teams hate).

$5 a month (one month free trial) seems like a steal!

TRUFFOL

truffol-1

I’m not big on iPhone cases. I find them mostly clunky and ugly. It’s as if the majority of case makers have decided the clean lines of the iPhone must be completely covered or ignored. So most cases do not complement the beauty of the iPhone, they mask it.

Until now.

Enter the Truffol case line. These cases look like they shared the same nursery with the iPhone. They are minimally invasive, minimally bulky, and maximally beautiful. Forget plastic and rubber, try brushed aluminum, stainless steel, wood and leather. I just ordered the Classic…see image…but as you might imagine, there’s a model called the Minimalist.

“Every case is machined down to the 0.05th millimeter to ensure a perfect fit,” according to the Truffol site. Even the hand-tooled leather only adds .4 mm thickness.

You can order yours here. (Warning, they are not cheap at $60-75!)

MODO

modo_feature_amodo_feature_fModo stands for modular desk organizer. “it is impossible for you to not connect with the simplicity and functionality of this incredible desktop organizer,” assert designers Jelena Tomic and Bojan Smiljanic, “It was born out of the need for a better way to organize our workstations.”

They point out the Zen quality of the design. “Zen and balance in life is achieved if all the elements are in sync with each other. You may own the best of the smartphone, tablet and the most expensive pens, but what good are these if they are not in harmony with your surroundings. It takes a little creative genius to see the value in orienting horizontal wall pegs, downsizing them and placing them as verticals. Crafted from naturally warm bamboo and matte finished aircraft grade aluminum, this customizable plug ‘n organize system will conform to whatever devices and equipment you use now and in the future.”

The Modo pins can be spaced in any configuration to store items like your tablet, computers, note books / pads, phones, hard drives, letters, pens, pencils, etc.  The Modo balls can be used as pin or tack cushions. The Modo caps provide extra protection for your device screens and double up as stylus tips. The Modo slots help manage your cables, and the USB hubs allow you to manage up to three thumb drives.

On sale here for $36…mine is on its way. Cleaner desk here I come.

 

HANDLEBAND

Gee, what would an Elegant Solutions entry be without a biking solution? The Handleband, an ingeniously simple and safe way to mount your smartphone on your bike, was born at the Stanford d school, and launched on Kickstarter, meeting its modest funding goal of $12,000 ten times over.

I’ve never purchased a single product that enables my iPhone to be attached to my bike(s) in an elegant way. They’re all too heavy, too large, unsafe, hazardous, hard to use, or just plain ugly. As a result, my phone goes in the back pocket of my cycling jersey, or in my Camelbak, rendering it unusable for anything other than listening to music or answering phone calls thru headphones. That’s a waste, because the many apps available can easily replace the functionality of virtually any cycling computer, with the possible exception of a cadence counter (app opportunity, anyone?)

Here’s the video.

[vimeo 67153890]

 

And here’s where to pre-order for $25.

Reflection: The Art of Hansei

Tuesday, December 28th, 2010

Around this time of year, most of us, and our businesses, tend to slow down just a bit from the normal dawn-to-dusk mad dash. We smile a bit more. We wave people in before us in traffic, and let others with less in their shopping carts go first in the grocery store. And we reflect.

When I was working with Toyota, I learned the art of hansei (pronounced hahn-say). Hansei is the Japanese word for reflection. But its meaning is closer to introspection. Hansei finds its roots in Eastern philosophy and religion, but it is a profound skill to be mastered. Japanese school children are taught from kindergarten how to perform hansei, and it is a vital part of learning and improving.

The key insight is this: Hansei is performed regularly, as a discipline, irrespective of performance! In other words, whether you got an A or a C on your report card, you conduct hansei to better understand the process that lead to the specific result.

In business, the fruit of a formal hansei used for planning purposes is new insights which can used to set new goals, strategies, and directions.

But here’s the thing: most us don’t reflect often enough, or consider it a tool worthy enough to use regularly. Generally we do a post-mortem when we fail at something, but too often the goal is fault-finding, not learning. And mostly we pop champagne if we exceed all expectations, and leave it with a big attaboy. But there is no real learning in that, because whether you miss a mark under or over, there’s a gap there that demands better understanding. IF we want to get better, that is.

The late Peter Drucker suggested a practical reflection method which amounts to a daily routine of recording in a personal journal your key decisions and actions, along with a projection of the expected outcome. You then review your performance and satisfaction, feeding back from outcomes to expectations. He suggested getting additional input from a superior, peer or subordinate.

Over time, trends show up, pointing out strengths and weaknesses. Drucker wrote, “I have been doing this for some fifteen to twenty years now. And every time I do it I am surprised. And so is everyone who has ever done this.”

I have a simple daily hansei regimen that I look forward to (with a glass of good Malbec) which has definitely yielded some surprises, in the form of both good and not-so-good ideas. Here’s what to do:

  1. Make time. Try to set aside at least 15 minutes per day to begin with. But don’t be limited either way…if you only have 5 minutes, use it. If you’re on a roll, don’t stop.
  2. Review experience. Use the Army After Action Review technique of answering three simple questions as they relate to your day: What was supposed to happen? (What did you think would happen?) What actually happened? What accounts for any differences or gaps between what you thought or expected to happen and what actually happened?
  3. Spot trends. As time progresses (and after you’ve done this for a while), note any recurring themes, and write down any potential connections among seemingly unconnected things.
  4. Riff and project. Think of a few “what if” ideas that come to mind based on the first three steps. Jot down opportunities to test out those new ideas. Take your “what ifs” and turn them into “if-then” hypotheses: what do you think will happen if you do (X)? Make some quick notes—to do’s, not-to-do’s, etc.—that will initiate your thoughts and provide some preliminary direction.

Hansei is meant to help you improve your performance and creativity by getting your thought and actions better aligned by making them more visible to yourself. The hardest part, of course, is step one. It helps if you don’t view reflection as a chore or strict linear writing exercise. So you might want to avoid using a lined journal. Instead, consider perhaps my current favorite, the Dot Grid Cahier, offered by Behance.

As you head into 2011, do like Drucker said, and use the art of hansei to surprise yourself!