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What Would Peter Do?

We are in the midst of a long period of uncertainty. Yet we, as practicing leaders, must move ourselves, our organizations, and society ahead. We accomplish most with the cooperation of others, working in groups for good or for evil. Leaders and managers like you and me are responsible for good or evil because management is the governing organ of all institutions. We are the stewards of a functioning society. How we lead organizations makes our world self-serving or society-serving, corrupt or honest, evil or good. It is a perpetual battle.

Thankfully, even with all the uncertainty, there is one source for navigating through turbulence: Peter Drucker, who saw the full spectrum of evil and good in his lifetime.

To understand his wisdom, it helps to understand him.

Born November 19, 1909, in Austria, Drucker’s life began in turbulent times as the 600-year Habsburg dynasty was crumbling and just before the rise of Hitler. In his book Adventures of a Bystander, Drucker describes himself as an observer of history as it unfolded. His sense of adventure and humour is evident as he recounted his participation in a November 11, 1923, socialist march in Vienna:

“Legally, I was not permitted to take part, nor were the Young Socialists permitted to have me; legally, a high-school student had to be fourteen to take part in any political activity. There was not much risk in my marching eight days before the statutory age. I knew this; yet the illegality of my marching, however riskless and trivial, added spice.

It was certainly one reason why I let myself be recruited. But then I was also a rather lonely boy and far from popular with my classmates. And so, when the formidable organizer of Doebling’s Young Socialist,,s a muscular medical student of whom I remember nothing, not even her name, except that she had a moustache, asked me to lead the procession, I accepted eagerly.”

The young Drucker did not finish the march. Yet the seeds of his interest in people, organizations, and the great need for a functioning society were sown.

Drucker is world-famous for being the father of modern management. Four years after he died in 2005 - coincidentally on the November 11th date of the 1923 socialist march - management consulting firms all over the world commemorated the centennial of his birth, knowing that Drucker, history’s greatest management thinker, gave birth to every one of their companies and their careers.

Origins of Peter Drucker’s Ideas

From Vienna, Drucker’s geographic journey took him to Germany and England before his final destination, the United States. His intellectual journey, though, took him much further.

His first book, The End of Economic Man, published in 1939, soon after he emigration to the USA, predicted that no country would resist the Nazis until it was too late. The Nazis used propaganda to sow mistrust and chaos, leaving the citizenry confused, exhausted, or withdrawn. The Hitler-Stalin cooperative campaigned to prove Peter Drucker did not exist, that it was the pen name of a sinister force. All he wrote was fake. Censors aimed to keep his articles out of print and Drucker himself unemployed, much like present-day social media disinformation.

Drucker recognized that great leaders did not instil arbitrary fear and uncertainty. Weak leaders do that through manipulation, threats, and coercion. Citizens turn to apathy and dictators when hope is lost, as do employees during turmoil. “Just tell me what to do”, they say, absolving themselves of responsibility for the results.

The contrast with Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt, who led with determination and optimism, provided motivation for Drucker’s moves in those free societies.

Drucker later wrote that Churchill’s emergence in 1940 was the reassertion of the basic moral and political values “prayed and hoped” for in The End of Economic Man. Churchill embodied the constructive people, organizations, and society principles to which we all, as practicing leaders, aspire.

Drucker found himself with not only an unexpected ally for good, but a champion. In The London Times, Churchill wrote a glowing review of The End of Economic Man and repeatedly wrote about it in weekly columns. When he became British Prime Minister, he mandated that every British officer candidate get a copy of the book.

40 Books and the Drucker Archives

The End of Economic Man was the first of Drucker’s 40 books. The last was The Effective Executive In Action, published in his final year, 2005. The breadth of his writing is astonishing: management, capitalism, society, global dynamics, non-profits, Japanese art, pension funds, and, of course, the role of organizations and their impact on the world.

Add to that the totality of the Drucker Archives. With nearly 200 gigabytes of text, images, and video, the breadth and depth of documenting Drucker’s career are mind-boggling.

You can buy the books. You can access the Archives. But it is very difficult to read it all, organize it in your own mind, process it all, and make it actionable.

Search the web? Yes. Use an AI tool? OK. Yet worldwide data proliferation is overwhelming. And much Drucker content is misinformation, just like the internet, social media, and AI results. It is all presented with false certainty or disclaimers that the results might be wrong.

Masherg’s Law, which says the flood of bad information drowns out the trickle of good information, applies in the Drucker world as well.

One of the most repeated phrases 'culture eats strategy for breakfast' is not Drucker at all. It is just something catchy, made up by someone creating a presentation to grab your attention. An intellectual sort of clickbait.

True Drucker is not clickbait.

To fix this, experts on Peter Drucker’s legacy have developed a set of Drucker Principles that are sourced from his books, archives at the Drucker Institute in Claremont, California, and the Drucker School of Management, where Drucker spent 30 productive years writing, consulting, and teaching.

Drucker was an astute observer of the people and organizations, pragmatically distilling what worked and what did not.

Drucker was not a traditional academic researcher. He did not perform experiments generating volumes of data, leading to papers published in arcane academic journals. Rather, he was an astute observer of the people and organizations, pragmatically distilling what worked and what did not. Only then did he write books and articles for many media outlets, such as the Wall Street Journal and Harvard Business Review.

His writing was lucid but required the reader to process his words carefully and thoughtfully. Sometimes it requires hard work. And sometimes his voice gets lost in the editorial homogenization of esteemed publications.

Developing Leaders Quarterly, in partnership with the Drucker Institute and the Drucker School of Management, takes a different approach.

The Drucker experts have distilled the historical record into a set of readable and authoritative Principles. Coming from the global authority on Peter Drucker, readers can be assured that the Principles are accurate, sourced, and most importantly, rigorously actionable to make a positive impact on you, your organization, and society.

In the centennial year of Drucker’s birth, Harvard Business Review celebrated with a cover picture of Drucker with the famous question, “What would Peter do?”

That is a question each of us can always remember and always ask of ourselves and our team. It is a convenient step into thoughtful leadership, but only the first step. With 40 books and thousands of articles and interviews, none of us can get it all into our heads. What do we do after asking, “What would Peter do?”

What Peter Drucker wisdom can we, as practicing leaders, apply as we manage our organizations? These are the questions we will explore with you in this column of future issues of Developing Leaders Quarterly.