PART ONE

The Leader’s Role in Shaping the Organization’s Future

Peter admonished us in class: “You cannot predict the future, but you can create it.” His method of creation was what we term strategic planning—a topic some senior executives ignore as an important element of leadership. Several years ago one CEO of a major corporation called his senior executives together on his ascension to the position and announced: “Gentlemen, I’m dismantling the strategic planning division and ceasing all strategic planning. I am not a believer.” Peter, however, was not only a believer, he thought that strategic planning was the foundation of all leadership. In his view, a leader’s primary responsibility was to think through the organization’s mission clearly and then to promote it throughout the organization, setting goals, priorities, and standards to measure progress along the way.

Peter emphasized that though planning, especially strategic planning, was difficult and risky, it was the first priority of the leader. He told us that strategic planning is not about making decisions in the future, since decisions could only be made now, in the present. So what we were really talking about was making decisions now to create a desired future. The idea was to reach the goals or objectives we set regardless of the environmental conditions we might later encounter, and this would require adjustments and changes along the way. It was crucial to start with the leader’s objectives derived from the definition of the mission of the organization, the answer to the question, What business are we in? Only then could we decide on the actions we needed to take now, in the present, to realize these goals in the future. And these actions incorporated the most important task: to anticipate crisis.¹

All of this had to do with a basic definition he developed for the difference between management and leadership: “Management is about doing things right; leadership is about doing the right things.” Only the leader could make the decisions as to what were “the right things,” even the right risks to take. Integrate this into a systematic process, and leaders fulfill their primary responsibility through strategic planning. The first five chapters describe what Drucker taught us about how to do this.