Tools For Effectiveness

• Learn the five characteristics you must understand about yourself to remain engaged and productive over the course of a long career.
  InBrief summary of “Managing Oneself”, Harvard Business Review
• Learn how to remain effective throughout your life, over periods of change and years of work.
  Excerpt from Chapter 47 of Management: Revised. Copyright ©2008 by the Peter F. Drucker Literary Trust. Posted with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Click here to buy the book.
• Learn how to prepare for a career as a solo act.
• Learn what it takes to be a great leader.
• Prepare yourself for the new management challenges of the 21st Century.

• How can a company can do the right things and still wind up in trouble? Find out, and then read what you can do about it.
  Excerpt from “The Theory of the Business,” Harvard Business Review
• Read about the seven places to find promising innovation opportunities.
  InBrief summary of “The Discipline of Innovation,” Harvard Business Review
• Read The Wall Street Journal’s selection of Drucker’s 12 greatest insights from his two decades as a columnist, including “The Five Deadly Business Sins” and “The Delusion of Profits.”
• Unbundle what your company does.
  “Sell the Mailroom,” The Wall Street Journal.
• “Management always deals with the nature of Man, and with Good and Evil,” Drucker wrote. “Management is a liberal art.” Watch Connie Martinson’s interviews with more than 3,000 novelists and authors on works of history, psychology, sociology, and more to learn from today’s leading liberal arts thinkers. Then put people first by treating management as a liberal art.

• Innovation isn’t just the province of business. Learn from past winners of the Peter F. Drucker Award for Nonprofit Innovation:
  1. (VIDEO ) See how Crafts with Conviction helps idle prisoners turn unwanted office supplies into learning tools for children in under-resourced schools.
  2. (VIDEO ) Learn how Common Ground transformed a derelict area of Times Square while helping unemployed people acquire new skills and find work.
  3. (VIDEO ) Watch members of The Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project as they train detained immigrants to represent themselves in an unfamiliar legal system.
• Search a database of thousands of past applications for the Peter F. Drucker Award for Nonprofit Innovation for inspiring examples of change that creates a new dimension of performance.
• Purchase The Nonprofit Drucker, the social-sector leader’s guide to action from the greatest management thinker of our time. Available as a digital download or on 25 CDs.
• Find inspiration and insight in this excerpt from Drucker’s classic article “What Business Can Learn from Nonprofits” in Harvard Business Review.

• “We need effective government,” Drucker wrote. “For this, however, we need something we do not have: a theory of what government can do.”
  “Really Reinventing Government”, The Atlantic

Though Drucker often expressed disappointment with government’s failures, time and again he held up individual political and military figures as models of effective leadership. He hoped that all organizations would learn from their example.

“Dwight Eisenhower, George Marshall, and Harry Truman were singularly effective leaders, yet none possessed any more charisma than a dead mackerel… No less charismatic personality could be imagined than Abe Lincoln of Illinois, the raw-boned, uncouth backwoodsman of 1860. And there was amazingly little charisma to the bitter, defeated, almost broken Churchill of the interwar years…

“Indeed, charisma does not by itself guarantee effectiveness as a leader… Nor are there any such things as ‘leadership qualities’ or a ‘leadership personality’…

“What then is leadership if it is not charisma and not a set of personality traits?... What distinguishes the leader from the misleader are his goals. Whether the compromise he makes with the constraints of reality—which may involve political, economic, financial or people problems—are compatible with his mission and goals or lead away from them determines whether he is an effective leader. And whether he holds fast to a few basic standards (exemplifying them in his own conduct), or whether ‘standards’ for him are what he can get away with, determines whether the leader has followers or only hypocritical time-servers…

“If Winston Churchill is an example of leadership through clearly defining mission and goals, Gen. George Marshall, America’s chief of staff in World War II, is an example of leadership through responsibility. Harry Truman’s folksy ‘The buck stops here’ is still as good a definition as any.”

— Peter F. Drucker, Managing for the Future