President's Column
In Memory of a Special Leader:
Encounters with
Peter Drucker
Peter F. Drucker passed away on November 11, eight days before his 96th birthday. Since he was a professor at Claremont Graduate University while I attended neighboring Claremont McKenna College in the late 1970s, I had the opportunity to meet Professor Drucker during a couple of his on-campus seminars.
After over 25 years, I still remember two lessons from those seminars which later influenced my professional path as a manager and change agent:
- Management's vital role to anticipate the future and be a change leader.
- The importance of continuously eliminating waste in an organization. (He called it “organized abandonment” at the time.)
I rediscovered these lessons in his writings years later– see the excerpts of his work featured in this issue.
Professor Drucker was truly one of the early “lean thinkers” who I believe complements the works of Ford, Deming, and Shingo. His brilliance is not only how he addressed modern thinking on management from organizational change to process improvement, but also how he anticipated them by decades.
If you're just starting your Drucker library, a good first addition is The Essential Drucker, a compilation of his greatest writings.
But my favorite Drucker book is The Effective Executive, first published in 1966 and still in print today. If you're a new manager and want straight, sound advice about how and where to focus your efforts, read it. If you're a seasoned executive and want a practical handbook for improving as a leader, read it.
Professor Drucker, thank you for your contributions and inspiration. You made a real difference for me, countless others, and society.
-- Mark Edmondson
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We hope you enjoy this special issue of "The LEAN Executive", dedicated to the memory and work of Peter F. Drucker.
As always, your comments and suggestions are welcome - please follow the links at the bottom to send a note to the editor, or to forward this eNewsletter to colleagues.
Yours in success,
The LEAN Affiliates Team
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Drucker on Implementing Change
Find a Change Champion
by Peter F. Drucker
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Action Point: Make sure the best ideas in your organization have fierce advocates to see them through a test in the marketplace.
Everything improved or new needs first to be tested on a small scale; that is, it needs to be piloted. The way to do this is to find somebody within the enterprise who really wants the new. Everything new gets into trouble.
And then it needs a champion. It needs somebody who says, “I am going to make this succeed," and who then goes to work on it. And this person needs to be somebody whom the organization respects. This need not even be somebody within the organization.
Often a good way to pilot a new product or new service is to find a customer who really wants the new, and who is willing to work with the producer on making truly successful the new product or the new service. If the pilot test is successful – it finds the problems nobody anticipated but also finds the opportunities that nobody anticipated, whether in terms of design, of market, of service – the risk of change is usually quite small.
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Drucker on Cost-Cutting
Organized Abandonment
by Peter F. Drucker
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Action point: Set up a systematic process of reviewing all products, processes, and services. Abandon those that no longer contribute to customer value.
To start cost cutting, management usually asks: “How can we make this operation more efficient?”
It is the wrong question. The question should be: “Would the roof cave in if we stopped doing this work altogether?”
And if the answer is “probably not,” one eliminates the operation. It is always amazing how many of the things we do will never be missed.
Businesses that actually succeed in cutting costs don’t wait until they have to cut costs. They build cost-cutting into normal operations. They build into their routine operations organized abandonment. Otherwise, eliminating activities and operations runs into extreme political resistance.
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Recommended Reading
The Effective Executive
by Peter F. Drucker
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First published in 1966 and still in print today, this is perhaps Drucker's most "personal" book describing how the individual "knowledge worker" (you) can best contribute and achieve results. Also our president's favorite and most quoted Drucker book.
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Recommended Reading
The Essential Drucker:
The Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker's Essential Writings on Management
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So you want to study Drucker, but between his 30-odd books and countless articles, you just don't know where to begin? Then this book is for you. Think of The Essential Drucker as a "reader's digest" compilation of his best works.
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Recommended Reading
The Daily Drucker:
366 Days of Insight and Motivation for Getting the Right Things Done
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No time to read even one of Drucker's books? Here's a compilation of 366 key concepts of Drucker's, delivered in daily doses and easy to digest.
A handsome hardcover edition with a ribbon place holder. The perfect holiday gift for a valued colleague or client.
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Browse our collection
of recommended reading
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