PART FIVE

The Marketing Model of Leadership

Thus far, I have concentrated on “Drucker on Leadership,” that is, Drucker’s own ideas, concepts, and principles. I have documented his thoughts, and noted if and how these changed, as well as where I filled in the blanks.

This section is different. Drucker stated unequivocally that leadership was “a marketing job”; however, he did little to develop this concept. He did not define a marketing job or explain how to apply marketing thought to leadership. This section begins with Drucker’s views and continues with my interpretation of where his concepts lead.

Marketing as a leadership concept probably is Drucker’s most audacious idea in the field. By this, he did not mean that leadership should be manipulative, a belief I’m afraid many executives hold even without the marketing model, much to the detriment of themselves, their organizations, and those they lead. It is worth recalling that Drucker defined leadership in these terms:

“Leadership is the lifting of a man’s vision to higher sights, the raising of a man’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a man’s personality beyond its normal limitations.”¹

Some who do not deal in marketing directly hold on to another very old but incorrect notion: that marketing is just a fancy word for selling and that the two are identical. In Drucker like fashion, Peter explained the difference in a statement that, while true, was designed to provoke both thought and controversy. “The objective of marketing,” he said, “is to make selling superfluous.”² (More about this in Chapter Twenty.)

In the late 1980s, I concluded that leadership and salesmanship shared a common and important element—persuasion. I examined literature in both disciplines and was amazed at the similarities in goals and the techniques used to persuade, and concluded that good salespeople were also leaders, and good leaders frequently employed techniques used by good and ethical salespeople.

Then Peter published Management Challenges for the Twenty First Century. In a chapter titled “Management’s New Paradigms,” he restated many of the ideas he spoke of years earlier, including the idea of treating all workers as if they were volunteers (see Chapter Nineteen). He went even further and called workers “partners,” and wrote that partners couldn’t simply be ordered around—they had to be persuaded. My first thought was, “Did I actually anticipate Drucker in this insight?” Maybe. However, Peter went further and left me in the dust. Since “partners” had to be persuaded, leadership was “a marketing job.”³ This got me thinking. I knew he didn’t mean any kind of manipulation, which would have gone against all of his beliefs. What then did Drucker mean by “a marketing job”?

Modern marketing rests on something called the “marketing concept.” The basis of the marketing concept is that firms should seek to discover and then satisfy the needs of their customers rather than persuade customers to purchase existing products or services in which they might not be interested. Since Drucker taught that if marketing were done perfectly, selling would be unnecessary, to practice marketing correctly, it would be necessary to understand the needs of each group or customer segment, including their values and behaviors, so as to approach them in their preferred manner and allow them to relate to the product or service without interference. In Drucker’s terms, if the marketing aspect of leadership were done perfectly, the persuasion element would be unnecessary. I recalled Xenophon’s description of Cyrus the Great’s leadership, which was so powerful that one king defeated by him, on his own initiative, paid twice the tribute Cyrus asked. Drucker was on to something. In this final section, I present my adaptation of Drucker’s revolutionary and bold concept.