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Leveraging the Strengths Of the Disabled

Ron Tang — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 07:30:00 -0400

When the House passed legislation in late June that expanded protections for disabled people, it marked an important step forward on an important issue. But what the workplace needs, even more than a new law, is an old insight -- one first offered by Peter Drucker more than 40 years ago.

"To make strength productive is the unique purpose of organization," Drucker wrote in his 1967 classic, The Effective Executive. "It cannot, of course, overcome the weaknesses with which each of us is abundantly endowed. But it can make them irrelevant."

This holds true for everyone, of course. As Drucker noted, "Strong… more

Drucker's Take On Making Mistakes

Ron Tang — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 11:29:00 -0400

Lyndon Johnson occupied the White House when KeyCorp first began raising its dividend. The Beatles topped the pop charts. Martin Luther King Jr. led tens of thousands of civil rights marchers through Alabama.

For 43 straight years, the company's annual payout climbed, "a record we were extremely proud of," in the words of KeyCorp Chief Executive Henry Meyer. That is, until earlier this month. The Cleveland bank, slammed by the weak housing market and an adverse tax ruling, announced that it would halve its dividend to 75 cents in a bid to save $200 million a year. It also said it… more

Obama's Drucker-Style Win

Ron Tang — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 10:13:00 -0400

As Barack Obama claimed the Democratic nomination for President last week, pundits were quick to credit any number of factors in his vanquishing of the once-vaunted Clinton political machine: Obama's rock-star charisma, his scintillating speechmaking, what he himself has described as his "almost spooky good fortune."

But I chalk it up, in large measure, to one thing: his superior ability -- or at least his advisers' superior ability -- at management, Peter Drucker-style.

In fact, it was almost as if the Obama camp had methodically worked through the five questions with which Drucker believed every organization -- whether a business, public agency,… more

Conditioning the Corporate Athlete

Ron Tang — Thu, 22 May 2008 11:47:00 -0400

Thirty-five years ago, in his classic Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, Peter Drucker declared that the means by which most people had long run their organizations -- through a mix of perks and punishment, rewards and reprimands -- was all but dead.

"The basic fact," Drucker wrote, "is that the traditional... approach to managing, that is the carrot-and-stick way, no longer works."

It was striking, then, to read a few weeks ago of Whirlpool's decision to suspend 39 workers who had claimed to be nonsmokers -- apparently in an attempt to avoid paying a $500 surcharge on their health insurance -- but then… more

Exxon Mobil Needs a Longer View

Ron Tang — Fri, 09 May 2008 07:18:00 -0400

John D. Rockefeller has been described in many different ways: as greedy and cutthroat, as munificent and caring, as "solitary, taciturn, remote, and ascetic," in the words of author Daniel Yergin. But as a manager, perhaps Rockefeller's most indispensable quality was this: He was uncompromisingly forward-looking.

It was Rockefeller, more than any single figure, who helped revolutionize the way people in the 19th century illuminated their homes, hastening the shift from costly whale oil to kerosene -- a fuel that was, as he put it, "cheap and good."

Rockefeller's heirs recently evoked that history, as they went public with their criticism of… more

Dusting Off a Managing Tome

Ron Tang — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 07:28:00 -0400

Of all of Peter Drucker's achievements -- advising captains of industry and heads of state, coining the term "knowledge worker," winning the Presidential Medal of Freedom -- the most remarkable may be this: In 1974, his 800-plus-page tome, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, vaulted past The Joy of Sex on the national best seller list.

Last week, HarperCollins released a revised edition of Management. And regardless of whether it winds up eclipsing Bonk, the latest hot-selling volume on the physiology and psychology of sex, I can tell you this: It deserves a spot on every manager's shelf, much as the Physicians' Desk… more

Peter Drucker's Winning Team

Ron Tang — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 12:23:00 -0400

In the summer of 1985, an executive named Peter Bavasi pored over a Harvard Business Review article by Peter Drucker in which the great management thinker described the "widow maker" -- a job so inherently impossible that it was apt to defeat even the best and brightest.

Drucker's warning, "Any job that ordinarily competent people cannot perform is a job that cannot be staffed," was especially ominous for Bavasi. He had, you see, just become president of the Cleveland Indians, a sports franchise to which the word "hapless" seemed inextricably tied.

So Bavasi called Drucker to seek his counsel, and there began… more

Drucker And the Complexities Of Race

Ron Tang — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 11:22:00 -0400

Long before so much of the nation became fixated on what was being preached inside black churches on Sunday mornings, Peter Drucker would go on occasion and listen for himself.

It was the late 1930s, and Drucker had just landed in New York, having fled the Nazis. Whenever he happened to spend the weekend in Washington, Drucker recalled years later, he would sneak into Rankin Chapel to be "shaken and moved" by Howard Thurman, the chaplain at Howard University. His was the kind of voice, said Drucker, that "reached the inner core of one's being."

Thurman's soul-stirring oratory, as well as relationships… more

Buffett's Plan For Successful Succession

Ron Tang — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 23:00:00 -0400

A couple of weeks ago, Berkshire Hathaway Chairman Warren Buffett officially put the kibosh on what many an investor must have regarded as the ultimate succession plan: "I've reluctantly discarded the notion of continuing to manage the portfolio after my death -- abandoning my hope to give new meaning to the term 'thinking outside the box,'" Buffett, 77, wrote in his annual letter to shareholders.

Despite his tongue-in-cheek approach, Buffett touched on one of the most important issues an enterprise faces: figuring out who's the right person to one day take the reins.

A company's very "survival," Peter Drucker wrote in his… more

Wide-Angle Thinking

Ron Tang — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 15:22:00 -0500

Charles Handy has been called "the Peter Drucker of Britain." But in a sense, pinning Handy to a particular place misses the whole point.

In the last year alone, this venerated thinker and writer on organizational behavior and society has left his home near London to spend time in Hong Kong, China, Romania, Spain, Italy, Denmark, Sweden, and India. He's also made three trips to the U.S., where he just wrapped up a five-week stay as a scholar-in-residence at Claremont Graduate University's Drucker School of Management and the Drucker Institute, of which I am the director.

It was there that… more