CEOs have work of their own.
It is work only CEOs can do,
but also work which CEOs must do. . . .
Each knowledge worker must think and behave
like a chief executive officer.1
—Peter F. Drucker
In the last years of his life, Peter Drucker focused like a laser on what had increasingly fascinated him—the role of the CEO. As corporations grew more unwieldy, worldwide competition sharpened, and customers and shareholders alike became more litigious, Peter rightly saw CEOs as more important than ever. They had to provide leadership—strategic leadership, moral leadership, human leadership—and balance. Today’s rate and magnitude of change leave little room for leadership error. Peter believed that the CEO role was the next area of management research. Procter & Gamble’s CEO, A.G. Lafley, called it “Peter’s unfinished chapter.”
Good or bad, the CEO sets the tone for an organization, its mission and culture, and its actions and results during his or her tenure if not thereafter as well. As a consultant and adviser, Peter worked with hundreds of CEOs and observed a remarkable diversity of leadership personalities in action, from Jack Welch at GE to Frances Hesselbein, head of the Girl Scouts of America; from President Eisenhower in 1950 to Mike Zafirovski, who ascended to the top spot of Nortel at the dawn of the twenty-first century—almost seven decades after Drucker first worked with Alfred Sloan at General Motors.
For decades, Peter thought about how CEOs could be more effective. He mused about how they could change more than just corporations and foundations—how they could even shape the course of countries. And he worried about how they could harm all sorts of people if they were less than ethical. Once again, Peter offered us keen insight into the future. The reputation of CEOs has taken a pounding in recent years because of what I call the “Enron effect” (but one could also call it the “WorldCom wake”).
With all the emphasis in the business press on the highest-level executives, it is easy to overlook the need for each knowledge worker to be his or her own CEO. The knowledge worker exists in a somewhat amorphous professional space. As Peter explained, “Knowledge workers are neither bosses nor workers, but rather something in between—resources who have responsibility for developing their most important resource, brainpower, and who also need to take more control of their own careers.”2
The knowledge worker’s professional life will typically span five or six or seven decades—far surpassing the life expectancy of most institutions and encompassing a variety of situations given the new mobility in space and time. It is both a great freedom and a responsibility to keep the bounce in our work and the spark of curiosity in our brain.
From my earliest days at McKinsey to my time with my own business, I have been a consultant to dozens of companies from the small, family-owned variety to the multinational Fortune 100, and I have been a CEO of a small firm. Yet I didn’t truly appreciate Peter’s near obsession with the CEO role until I spent a couple of years working with him. To distill into one word Peter’s thoughts on what makes a truly great CEO, it would be courage. I have shared with many a client the four-word summary from the legendary CEO of Electrolux during the 1970s and 1980s, Hans Werthen. When asked what it took for a small Swedish company to become the global leader in the white goods industry, Werthen responded: “Tigers don’t eat grass.”3
Whether one is at the helm of a company or a self-managing knowledge worker, it takes courage to do what is right, such as turning away from the temptation of quick short-term profits at the expense of investments for the long term. It takes courage to trailblaze change in an industry. It also takes courage to continuously redefine the business the company is in. It takes courage to face reality and get out of any product lines or businesses that “you wouldn’t get into if you were not in the business today.” Again, I stress what Jack Welch makes clear in his writings; he never hesitated when faced with the painful structural decisions or betting on the success of new ventures. Peter recognized that management’s most important capability is to take uncertainty out of the future by helping organizations see and selectively move around corners and place courageous bets.
We are at a moment in time when there is often greater uncertainty in resisting or ignoring changes than in playing or placing bets. CEOs have the vision to place the bets for enterprises; they must have the guts to lead change.
In our conversations, Peter defined three characteristics unique to a CEO:
1. A broad field of vision and the ability to ask and answer what needs to be done.
2. His or her thumbprint on the organization’s character and personality.
3. The influence he or she has on people—individually and collectively.
This chapter discusses each of these characteristics and illustrates them in action at a company Peter worked with closely: Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, better known as DLJ. It also mentions other companies where I’ve seen the dramatic effect Peter described. The chapter concludes by translating these characteristics to individual knowledge workers as CEOs of their own careers.
Peter constantly exhorted his clients to produce good results by looking at the whole. Theory is not enough. Theory grasps the relatively thickest threads and ignores the rest, the nuances of real life. But theory without observation is meaningless. Observations of the whole and observations of how theories are applied to solve the challenge of the enterprise are the most important thing in Drucker’s methodology.
The most important thing in Drucker’s
methodology—looking at the whole.
No one has the ability to see the whole like the CEO. At many companies, engineers tinker away with a particularly knotty technical or design problem, but they don’t look at 50-year trends in buying habits. Meanwhile, the vice president of marketing keeps close tabs on competitors but may have no idea how or at what expense his or her own company makes components. In any organization, the CEO links the inside—the organization—with the outside—society, the economy, technology, markets, customers, collaborators, the media, public opinion. Inside there are only costs. Outside there are results.
In looking at the whole, the CEO must ask, “What needs to be done?” To answer this question, the first task of the CEO is to define the outside of the organization, the outside where results are meaningful. Coming up with this definition obviously requires looking beyond the bricks and mortar (or sometimes virtual walls). But a truly honest and robust definition also means challenging assumptions, assessing what needs to be done and when, and selectively creating platforms for redefining and innovating the business, the organization, and even the industry. Through such courageous challenging and visioning, the CEO lays the foundation and boundaries for what needs to be done by asking essential questions (and not just assuming that the answers are obvious): What is our business? What should it be? What should it not be? The answers to these questions establish the boundaries of an institution. And they are the foundation for the work to be done by the CEO.
When CEOs fail to question long-standing assumptions or fail to listen to or see evidence that says, “These assumptions are no longer relevant to the opportunity that is our future,” their companies are guaranteed to have short lives. The average life of a company on the Standards & Poors list is just under 10 years; of the original companies on the first Forbes 100 list, published in 1917, only 5 of those made the 2005 global top 100 list (DuPont, Ford, General Electric, General Motors, and Procter & Gamble). In 1999, at Drucker’s ninetieth birthday celebration, he predicted that by his one-hundredth, in the year 2009, there would be five global automobile companies and that GM would not be one of them.
Experts summon all sorts of reasons why companies fail or are reconfigured into different pieces. Yet here’s the simple truth: The inability to adapt to changing landscapes leads to the premature deaths of companies that were once vibrant. As Peter said, “Most business issues are not the result of things being done poorly or even the wrong things being done. Businesses fail because the CEO’s assumptions about the outside provide decision frameworks for the institution which no longer fit reality.”4 These assumptions involve markets, customers, competitors, technology, and a company’s own strengths and weaknesses. The best CEOs don’t just ask what needs to be done; they also challenge assumptions along the way, and take off the table what doesn’t need to be done.
I’ve touched on failure, so I should mention success. Six of Business Week’s top ten fastest-growing small American companies, and seven of the ten companies that have shown the greatest equity value gains over the last five years, didn’t even exist twenty years ago. This dramatic performance highlights a key challenge to CEOs: to wrest the ability to challenge assumptions and redefine the way business is done from the financial markets. Up until recently, the venture capital and equity markets have served as the primary vehicles for creating new ways of doing business and even innovation—closing companies and opening new ones. Sure, shareholders liked this power, but it flies in the face of the business’s need to sustain itself. Ultimately this short-term obsession with results is closing down businesses, displacing employees, and ruining communities. It is the CEO’s responsibility to use his or her uniquely broad field of vision to challenge the status quo when answering the question “What is needed?” so that companies and communities can remain viable. On top of everything else, CEOs must do an astounding balancing act: They must lead the enterprise for the customers and employees and accommodate, but not bow to, the harsh demands of the stock market.
Not long ago, Dan Lufkin, one of three founders and co-CEOs at DLJ, ushered me to a long table in his fairly simple conference room overlooking Fifth Avenue in New York City. It was a plain space with just a few pieces of art on the wall. I didn’t even notice the astounding view until I was leaving because Lufkin was so engaging. He was reminiscing about the spectacular rise of Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, from a minuscule company to a Wall Street heavy hitter. It was all because of a bold move that Peter encouraged. But first, as Lufkin noted, Peter helped the three leaders see things clearly. By 1961, Peter had helped them see that the future was not in brawn but in brains, through an information society.
Skipping ahead to 1969, DLJ had built a good reputation, but the three founders, Bill Donaldson, Dan Lufkin, and Dick Jenrette, were frustrated by how their own limited capital constrained their ambitions. While larger firms were copying their ideas and growing, Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette didn’t have the personal capital they needed to truly grow their brokerage business. With the growth of automated transactions and the ascendance of the institutional investor, serving the customer now required big blocks of capital.
Peter sat down with the three at the end of the turbulent 1960s. Rather than telling them what to do, he posed questions. Lufkin still remembers how the questions started: “How will you grow? What is the right thing to do for your clients, for your employees? What is the right thing for the New York Stock Exchange?” The questions got increasingly detailed: “Without some form of permanent capital infused into the structure of the New York Stock Exchange, can it exist in the future? How can it work with this growing community of institutional investors?”
Peter didn’t stop there. He continued: “Would the strengthening of the greatest free market the world has ever known be enhanced by a more permanent growing base of capital? That being the case, tell me how would you do this if you didn’t go public? What other tools are there available?” Lufkin smiled when remembering Peter’s way of pushing his clients to think: “He would launch into some esoteric description of what happened in Germany during the 1930s that had little to do with the case.” But Lufkin always came away from his interactions with Peter understanding that if he (Lufkin) were patient enough, Peter’s ostensible “side stories” would ultimately lead to and help inform a broader field of vision. At a 1969 speech to the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), Peter shared some of the same side stories.
Lufkin reflected on that crucial moment. “He forced us to think with the assumption that we could change the rules of the New York Stock Exchange. He forced us to think about the issues created by the lack of permanent capital against a growing base of business, and how to solve that problem. We honestly believed that this was in the best interest of the New York Stock Exchange itself. We needed more permanent capital and so did the whole Exchange. And that led to what was a very courageous act.”
At this point, I should explain that in those days members of the NYSE such as DLJ were not allowed to sell shares to the public and be traded on the New York Stock Exchange because of a long-standing tradition. The Exchange was set up in 1792 with 14 members and limited numbers of companies’ shares traded. The Exchange had to approve every single shareholder of every member firm. Furthermore, the Exchange was a partnership—all members had joint and several liability for the solvency of the partnership. Members were also not allowed to trade their own shares because this was viewed as a conflict of interest.
Apparently customs had changed in the rest of the world—but not at the intersection of Wall Street and Broad Street. When DLJ announced it was going public, the Exchange went ballistic. Richard Jenrette has clear memories of that moment: “The Exchange was very comfortable approving every shareholder of every member. They were opposed to us going public because they said things like, ‘The Mafia might take over Wall Street.’” Exchange officials were also worried that investors would see exactly how profitable Wall Street was. DLJ had a 50 percent pretax profit margin at the time. Jenrette added, “In reality, the member firms were afraid that institutional investors, their best customers, would gain access to the New York Stock Exchange. There was a fear of big, institutional customers like the banks.” In fact, the fear of bank membership was realized many years later with the dilution, or weakening, of the Glass-Steagall Act in the 1990s, but the NYSE’s worst fears were not. Securities laws and conflict of interest considerations precluded the bank trust departments from monopolizing the brokerage business through their own nonbank subsidiaries, and the growth of the institutional investor changed the balance. The pension funds and endowments became increasingly independent of the bank, and independent mutual funds began to expand rapidly.5
The printed prospectus of the original offering of DLJ contains a puzzling line. Essentially it says, “You are buying shares in a company that given the possibility that the offering will not be approved by the board of governors of the New York Stock Exchange,” and, “If the rules of the New York Stock Exchange are not changed to allow this offering, DLJ will, at the stroke of the first share’s sale, lose 70 percent of its revenues.” If you read that in 1970, you might have asked, “are they crazy?” Cut 70 percent out of any business that you know of, and tell me how it survives.
The CEO sets the course for the
company and commits to the goals
that will define the company.
Finally, after DLJ threatened to resign from the Exchange and take its trades to a third market, officials caved. DLJ was allowed to go public and raise new equity capital, which it did in 1970, and became the first brokerage firm to trade on the New York Stock Exchange. As Bill Donaldson remembers, “Institutions cheered when DLJ went public.” With that move, DLJ changed Wall Street forever. In retrospect, DLJ and Drucker’s insights were prescient. In the following 24 months, a period of extraordinarily high interest rates, many of the firms that hadn’t followed DLJ’s example of raising permanent new capital by going public failed to survive. The Exchange itself eventually altered its own legal status and today is publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange. The permanent capital raised through public ownership is a major reason why Wall Street has remained the financial capital of the world. Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette redefined their business, and in some ways their industry, with their vision.
The CEO’s broad field of vision defines the business that the enterprise is in. The CEO sets the course for the company and commits to the goals that will both define and set external performance expectations for the company. This takes a keen scrutiny of the landscape, courage, and sometimes the ability to listen carefully, agree that there are potential and substantial risks—and still plunge ahead and make a tough decision.
The CEO works to shape the company, define and create new opportunities and realities, and make the organization leaner and more competitive. Of course, he or she also keeps in mind the importance of creating a legacy. When we think of the early days of the Ford Motor Company and IBM, we inevitably think of Henry Ford and Thomas Watson—even those of us who can’t recall their first products.
Every CEO, whether at a small family company or a multinational, leaves an imprint. As I visit clients and gain a sense of the company’s history, I’m often struck by how a particular CEO shapes the future of the company. For example, at Campbell’s Soup there is the Dr. John Dorrance era—when condensed soup was invented and introduced to the mass market—and condensed soup remains the identity of the company today. There are others as well. There’s the James McGowan era, when Campbell’s expanded into key ingredients—chickens, mushrooms, tomatoes—and the philosophy of caring about every ingredient is ingrained in the culture today. There’s the William B. Murphy era, when the company expanded internationally; the Gordon McGovern era of acquisitions, growth, and low profits; the David Johnson era of back to basics; the Dale Morrison era of revitalizing brands; and the Doug Conant era of revitalizing the business.
As the CEO nurtures and forms an organization’s personality, inevitably his or her own personality, or brand, rubs off on the place. Peter saw this thumbprint as being of the utmost importance to the next generation’s leading organizations. He wrote, “In the next society, the biggest challenge for the large company—especially for the multinational—may be its social legitimacy: its values, its mission, its vision.”6
The co-founders of DLJ had a dream. Fundamental to that dream was that each person in the organization could create or enhance an opportunity. The culture was that of letting a thousand flowers bloom. Donaldson and Lufkin believed in hiring people with passion whom they liked. And they were role models on what you can do with a passion. Donaldson and Lufkin had a passion for doing great research in smaller companies with strong management. Jenrette’s fingerprint was institutionalizing the idea of letting each person soar, while the firm grew. The 2000 Wetfeet.com guide to DLJ quotes an insider describing the job: “I actually have some control over what kinds of deals I work on. I can tell VPs I really want to work on this deal or work in a specific industry, and they try to make it happen.” The site quotes a recruiter’s insight as, “A low enthusiasm level is the kiss of death at DLJ.” Jenrette described the culture he worked to cultivate and institutionalize: “It was important that everyone took pride in what he/she did and understood that you didn’t have to be the CEO to do well. We always had at least a half-dozen people that were paid more than the CEO. We never had any contracts telling you in writing that you could not leave at year end. Each DLJ’er was responsible for putting in writing what he or she had accomplished and their goals for the coming year.
The CEO nurtures and forms
an organization’s personality.
“In the 70s, when the market was down, we did not lay anyone off. And we did not distribute under-valued options to executives.” Indeed Jenrette had to sell his townhouse during those down years. But he remembers the feeling of determination that carried the company through difficult times “We were all in this together. We never quit having fun and doing what we thought was right for our customer.”7 (Think for a minute. Would our colleagues use those phrases?)
The personal risks and people bets paid off. Under Jenrette’s leadership, the firm grew to just under 10,000 people. In the 1980s and 1990s, it had the lowest staff turnover rate of any Wall Street firm.
After leaving DLJ, Donaldson put his fingerprint on a number of organizations: The New York Stock Exchange, where, as chairman, he changed the fundamental focus of the enterprise, lengthened trading hours and opened up the Global Exchange; the Yale School of Management, which he helped found and then shape as the school’s first dean; and Aetna, where he stepped in as chairman and turned the company around. More recently, Donaldson served 26 months as head of the SEC. Thanks to his action orientation, the SEC made more changes during his tenure than at anytime since 1929, including imposing hefty fines on corporate wrongdoers and granting increased independence to boards of mutual-fund companies.
When things go badly, the CEO is responsible.
He or she cannot say, “I didn’t know.”
Peter maintained that the CEO sets the tone in all ways. That includes ethical standards. The CEO can take some credit when business surges, when profits rise, when analysts recommend the stock. When things go badly, the CEO is responsible. He or she cannot say, “I didn’t know.”
The story of Peter Drucker’s life and work is one of optimism, a belief in tomorrow, and a passion to help businesses and nonprofits survive and excel. But in the 1990s, Peter became disenchanted with several companies and CEOs that seemed to reward greed rather than performance. Drucker made bold statements regarding the excessive riches awarded to mediocre executives. He stood up to the greed, saying, “It is morally and socially unforgivable to reap massive earnings while firing thousands of their workers.”8 He emphasized that companies are not just about profit. Leaders forgot their missions when they became obsessed with raking in profits and ratcheting up the stock price. Drucker viewed the corporation as a human community built on trust and respect for the customer and the worker and not just a profit-making machine. And to counter what he saw as a culture of short-term gain, he stepped up consulting work with nonprofits as well as the CEOs he believed in.
At a company, someone must be in charge.
That is why we have CEOs.
In the final years of his life, Drucker was distressed to note that some bad players tarnished the image of the CEO. He would shake his head as he read about scandals at Enron and Arthur Andersen, scandals at Adelphi, scandals at WorldCom. Drucker felt personally betrayed. Not only did these cases reek of duplicity and misdeeds and outright lies, but what made them worse was that the people at the top often proclaimed that they were innocent because they didn’t know what was going on. To Peter, that was a sin. At a company, someone must be in charge, which requires that he or she be both fully informed on every significant aspect of the business and accountable for what happens. That is the role of the CEO.
The impact CEOs can have on people, their actions and their lives, is unmatched. As Peter wrote to Bob Buford, the CEO of a cable television network in 1990, “As I tried to stress, your first role . . . is the personal one. It is the relationship with people, the development of mutual confidence, the identification of people, the creation of a community. This is something only you can do.” Peter went on: “It cannot be measured or easily defined. But it is not only a key function. It is one only you can perform.”9
With Peter’s encouragement, DLJ changed the game by embracing a people policy fundamentally different from that of any other Wall Street firm. Peter helped design this policy and helped ensure that it was woven into the fabric of the firm and its orientation around people.
As Bill Donaldson remembered, “If we were going to spend as much time as we were going to in the business, we felt that it ought to be fun. And for it to be fun, we had to have a measure of people around us and with us that were good people that were great fun to be with, intellectually smart. In other words, we didn’t think we had to get some hard-nosed person that we couldn’t stand being with just for intelligence. We thought we could find intelligence with people who shared our values, and shared the sense of fun and building something.
“DLJ worked hard to create a collegial atmosphere where colleagues also considered each other friends—certainly not the convention at the time. On Wall Street, up until that time, everybody was on a commission basis. They were building their own little businesses; they were fighting for accounts, etc. We didn’t do any of that. Nobody was on commission. Nobody had an account. They were all firm accounts. We evaluated what people did at the end of the year both by them telling us what they thought they’d done during that year, as well as what we thought, as well as what our customers thought. Based on that, the compensation and rewards and so forth were allocated. It was sort of a total triangulation of evaluation. That made for teamwork. It allowed members of the firm to say that the fellow in the office next door really helped him, you know, and we rewarded that. And so we created an atmosphere, or DNA, if you will, at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette that existed for over 40 years.”10
Vision, organizational personality,
and influence take uncertainty out of the
future in the twenty-first century.
And Dick Jenrette noted, “Peter harped on how important people were and are. We had a number of organizational structures that played to the concept that the people were our most important asset. Peter also encouraged us to think of our employees as a volunteer organization would think of their volunteers.”11
The human policy that DLJ had was built on themes only a CEO could define and make real—and in the case of DLJ it took three CEOs to turn the words into a thriving organizational personality.
Each of these characteristics—vision, organizational personality, and influence—needs to be understood, and nourished. None of them can be assumed. Field of vision requires listening and looking—not telling. It requires regular eye checkups and allocating time to step back and interpret what you are seeing, perhaps the hardest part for a CEO. Personality means looking in the mirror, checking translations and amplifications, and recognizing that you are always a role model. Influence requires respecting people and treating the organization as a living entity that needs care and feeding. Each of these characteristics—vision, organizational personality, and influence—takes uncertainty out of the future in the twenty-first century. That is what a CEO—and only a CEO—can do.
What can the self-managing knowledge worker learn from these three characteristics as CEO of his or her own career? Maintaining a broad field of vision requires having a sense of where you are going and what you are building. It is the same for individuals, or a company with one knowledge worker, as it is for a grand enterprise employing thousands. One of my clients had a great analogy: “Have you ever been driving behind the elderly lady who is looking three feet in front of her at a time? She starts, and stops, and swerves. Compare that with a race-car driver who is looking at the whole track as well as feeling the immediate ground beneath her car.” That is the difference in vision in your career—are you going one step at a time, or seeing the broader landscape ahead. We have to place bets on ourselves, learn, and bet again. To make the greatest contributions, we have to put our heart and mind into it and be able to respond to the unexpected opportunities.
Peter maintained that this ability to see the whole and its immediate challenges and opportunities simultaneously requires a self-knowledge that most of us don’t have. We need to know our strengths, our values, and our passions, and we have to admit to our arrogance. Knowing our true strengths requires a sometimes painful level of consciousness. In Peter’s world we must “ask, check, and see.” Here’s one of his techniques for maintaining this orientation only few of us have: Whenever you make a key decision or take action, write down what you expect will happen. Then look back at it six to nine months later and compare what happened to your expectations. Ask people to exercise this form of self-discipline every day. Try to use your strengths in your work and your connections. Get feedback concerning where and how your strengths work and connect.
The second characteristic—organizational personality or brand—is about knowing yourself and what gives you passion (or, on the contrary, what puts you to sleep). As Peter so often reminded former students, working in an organization whose value system is unacceptable or incompatible with your own condemns you to frustration and to lackadaisical performance. He told me the story of a woman who was the daughter of a prominent banker, had majored in finance, and always assumed she would be a financial adviser. When she began her career, she was miserable. Two years later, she was an administrator in a hospital having the time of her life. She had to learn what gave her passion to unlock her willingness to leave a thumbprint. At one point during that conversation, Peter commented that he thought finance never really interested David Rockefeller. As CEO of the Chase Manhattan Bank, Rockefeller was known for his people skills and unique ability to relate to customers. He could open doors to any company in any country. During a meeting at Chase, Rockefeller would inquire about the client’s entire family (including pets) by name and birthday. But he did not seem to take an active interest in the day-to-day management of the bank. After retiring from Chase, he was free to stop doing what he was not interested in and could pursue his passion for serving and working with people through philanthropy.
Knowledge workers have to learn
to ask a question that has not been
asked before: What should I contribute?
As Peter wrote in 1999, “Throughout history, the great majority of people never had to ask the question, what should I contribute? They were told what to contribute, and their tasks were dictated either by the work itself—as it was for the peasant or artisan—or by a master or a mistress.”12 Knowledge workers have to learn to ask a question that has not been asked before: What should I contribute? And to answer that question they need to understand and meld their strengths and passions, and they repeatedly have to ask themselves the fundamental Drucker question: “If I were not in this career today, would I have gotten into it? If not, what am I going to do about it?”
Finally, the knowledge worker is both influenced by and influences others. We are influenced by the CEO—the premier role model who lives the purpose, values, and principles of the organization. That influence can and should be inspiring and transformative. Peter always said that if we are going to be passionate about our jobs, we must get the right signals from the top. We are also influenced by our individual passion and strengths. And, throughout our careers, we influence those many other knowledge workers with whom we connect.
The CEO has to live the purpose, the values,
and the principles of the organization.
Successful careers are not planned; they are managed. And to manage them, we need to put on our CEO hat. The way we manage our careers—switch from company to company, or become consultants or contractors, or start our own business—will be the next revolution. Managing your own life and career takes courage. We have to take calculated risks as individuals if we are going to make the most out of the cards we’ve been given to play in life. These days, we are not simply salaried employees. We are collaborators, and we all need to think like a CEO.
Peter said it years ago: “Each of us is a CEO.” As the CEO managing his own career, Peter Drucker was quite clear on what he wished his legacy to be. During one of our last conversations, he told me that he wanted to be remembered for one single accomplishment: “Enabling a few people to get the right things done. I mean that literally. I think the specific concepts for which most people know me, management by objectives, or what have you, are of very limited importance. My contribution, such as it is, is to create . . . no, not create . . . to highlight the concept of the responsible and effective executive of management as work and function and responsibility. The traditional definition of a manager is somebody who’s got subordinates. My contribution is the definition of a manager as somebody who has results. That’s very different. And it is not generally accepted. Most organizations staff their problems and starve their opportunities. And one of the things I’m good at is to counteract. And when people begin to start talking about problems, I say, ‘No, wait a minute. Let’s first look at the opportunities.’ Those are my contributions. I try to make them look forward instead of backward. Opportunities have a habit of asserting themselves. As things collapse, you can’t say, ‘I’m busy.’”
Peter said it years ago:
“Each of us is a CEO.”
Peter’s last words to me were: “OK. I’m getting tired, and that’s one thing I’m not allowed to do. Come back. I’ll be here. I’m not going anyplace.” He has left our physical world, but kept his promise to “be there”—his influence is embedded in our management past, our management present, and our management future.