Nearly every top guru of a discipline has had trouble saying anything novel beyond a point. After all, the status of gurudom means that it has all been heard before, or is a corollary of something heard before. That?s why dozing off denotes diminishing decisional danger. But then, along comes a book that snaps you awake, regains traction and runs a razor a la Ockham through the earlier stuff ? to leave you with a Big Idea that just refuses to go away. This, trust me, is not that book.
Written by Elizabeth Haas Edersheim, The Definitive Drucker is relatively modest. It only tries to show how the late management guru?s ?wisdom transcends geography and time?, as Nikhil Prasad Ojha of Monitor puts it in his preview blurb. On that objective, Edersheim, a business consultant who was once with McKinsey, does a fairly good job. The key test of Peter Drucker?s lasting relevance, perhaps, would be whether you can attribute to him a rescue plan of sorts for the Economic Man of the 21st century. And this book has enough hints of that possibility. Consider the guru?s assertion that one must now ?apply knowledge to knowledge? to score a win, just as one needed industrial efficiency in the 20th century, for example. It manages to nudge thoughts along.
This book also makes a point of doing justice to two of Drucker?s oft-cited quotations. The only way to predict the future is to create it, he famously said. And so, a note to follow, the only must-haves for a business are marketing and innovation. Marketing is mostly about customer-orientation, and on this, Edersheim lets P&G-Gillette?s chief AG Lafley do the Drucker talking: ?The CEO is the link between the reality of the outside and the insularity of the inside.? For its diapers brand Pampers, for instance, P&G found it pays not to let the factory mould, but the consumer play boss (page 75). Such a sense of perspective can make all the difference.
Innovation, on the other hand, depends on knowledge work. And on this, Drucker held in no uncertain terms that the big task is to challenge assumptions. Naturally, he had plenty to say about individual autonomy within a corporate set-up, and how one must map internal strengths on to external opportunities. All in all, his was a voice for liberation as much as reason, and when it came to taking decisions, he urged a high tolerance for weird alternatives: ?to stimulate your thinking?.
As anybody who has actually run a business can attest, what reads well on paper need not work well in practice. Little wonder, then, that this book also sighs the classic sigh for Xerox?s Palo Alto Research Center. This hothouse of tech wizardry invented most of the personal computer as we know it (page 176), but lost the market because the company?s ?toner heads? and eggheads shared little beyond an equation of mutual disdain. So much for a user-friendly interface to change the world.
Hence, Drucker?s admiration for Japanese firms. Toyota is effective in turning thought into action, he believed, because its brainwaves do not emerge from isolation chambers. The implementation guys are involved at the very ideation stage. This makes a big difference to how things happen once the plan rolls out. And contrary to popular belief, inclusive management can indeed be high-speed management.
Drucker being Drucker, most of the above gyaan is rather well known. So here?s the question: does this ?definitive? book (the title was presumably picked for its alliterative allure) apply knowledge to knowledge well enough to grab lasting mindspace? No, not really. But that was not the objective either. Judge from the way this book ends. Despite his decades, Drucker dithers over pinpointing his core contribution to the field of management, and he does it so disarmingly that you?d wish him a lot more time, maybe even an entire new career span, to apply his mind to the world as it shapes up from here on. Getting ideas across does take a long while. The world?s best known management guru of the past century is now gone, of course. Peter Drucker shall be missed. But there is another guru still around who has been shouting himself hoarse: Tom Peters, the author of Re-imagine! This is a book that doesn?t care much for the dignity of gurudom, and is so much the better for it. Peters raves and rants, even makes a nuisance of himself ? but to a plan. And he has a message that refuses to go away.