Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Dr. William Cohen (Pasadena, CA) is President of the Institute of Leader Arts. He has spoken and given workshops for small groups of managers and executives, and given keynote addresses in more than 50 countries to audiences of up to 15,000 in size. He has taught in the graduate schools of California State University Los Angeles, University of Southern California and Claremont Graduate University as well as three years with Touro University International, a fully accredited online university. A prolific author, speaker, and academic,?Dr. Cohen is also a retired major general from the U.S. Air Force Reserve and has held executive positions in several companies including Director of Research at Sierra Engineering Company, Manager of Advanced Technology Marketing at McDonnell Douglas Astronautics Company, and President of Global Associates. In addition to his BS in engineering from the United States Military Academy at West Point, he has an MBA from the University of Chicago, an MA and PhD in management from the Peter Drucker School of Management at Claremont Graduate University. He is a distinguished graduate in residence of the prestigious Industrial College of the Armed Forces in Washington, D.C.

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Praise for Drucker on Leadership

"Bill Cohen's Drucker on Leadership is the best collection of Peter Drucker's unique insights, deep wisdom, and practical advice I have ever read. Cohen channels Drucker as only a three-decades-long colleague and student can. You will find the lessons highly accessible, immensely enjoyable, and wonderfully fresh."

―Jim Kouzes, coauthor, The Leadership Challenge

"Cohen has written with clarity and authority about the major challenges facing leaders today. And Cohen, like Drucker, emphasizes responsibility and integrity in leadership, qualities so desperately needed today. I strongly recommend this book to you."

―Joseph A. Maciariello, Horton Professor of Management, Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management, and coauthor (with Peter Drucker), The Daily Drucker and Management by Peter F. Drucker

"Cohen's unique relationship with Peter Drucker, as student and friend, allows him to extract valuable leadership lessons from Drucker's writings and teachings on management. Cohen's 'labor of love' provides the essential lessons for leaders straight from the Father of Modern Management."

―Ronald E. Riggio, director, Kravis Leadership Institute at Claremont McKenna College

"For those who aspire to lead―and we need a new generation of Drucker-like leaders in organizations in every country around the world―Bill Cohen distills the essential leadership lessons from the world's greatest management thinker."

―Ira A. Jackson, dean and professor of management, Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management, Claremont Graduate University

"Through a blend of anecdote and analysis, Bill Cohen has given us great insight into Peter Drucker's thinking on leadership―an aspect of Drucker's work that many have misconstrued or overlooked altogether. This is a new prism through which to view Drucker and, as such, a valuable contribution to the field."

―Rick Wartzman, executive director, The Drucker Institute

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Praise for Drucker on Leadership

"Bill Cohen's Drucker on Leadership is the best collection of Peter Drucker's unique insights, deep wisdom, and practical advice I have ever read. Cohen channels Drucker as only a three-decades-long colleague and student can. You will find the lessons highly accessible, immensely enjoyable, and wonderfully fresh."

—Jim Kouzes, coauthor, The Leadership Challenge

"Cohen has written with clarity and authority about the major challenges facing leaders today. And Cohen, like Drucker, emphasizes responsibility and integrity in leadership, qualities so desperately needed today. I strongly recommend this book to you."

—Joseph A. Maciariello, Horton Professor of Management, Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management, and coauthor (with Peter Drucker), The Daily Drucker and Management by Peter F. Drucker

"Cohen's unique relationship with Peter Drucker, as student and friend, allows him to extract valuable leadership lessons from Drucker's writings and teachings on management. Cohen's 'labor of love' provides the essential lessons for leaders straight from the Father of Modern Management."

—Ronald E. Riggio, director, Kravis Leadership Institute at Claremont McKenna College

"For those who aspire to lead—and we need a new generation of Drucker-like leaders in organizations in every country around the world—Bill Cohen distills the essential leadership lessons from the world's greatest management thinker."

—Ira A. Jackson, dean and professor of management, Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management, Claremont Graduate University

"Through a blend of anecdote and analysis, Bill Cohen has given us great insight into Peter Drucker's thinking on leadership—an aspect of Drucker's work that many have misconstrued or overlooked altogether. This is a new prism through which to view Drucker and, as such, a valuable contribution to the field."

—Rick Wartzman, executive director, The Drucker Institute

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Drucker on Leadership

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

A major responsibility of any leader, according to Peter Drucker, is to determine the real business of an organization. I learned this lesson even before I met Drucker and became his student. I was a young manager, but although I had held management and executive titles in several business situations, I knew very little about business management. As a West Point graduate who had served in the Air Force, I knew something about leadership, but I hadn't sufficiently applied those skills to business management.

Shortly before meeting Drucker, I became director of research and development for a small company producing life-support equipment for military aviators as well as commercial airlines. The company was facing increasing difficulties resulting from the government's purchasing policies and timing. My company would receive a contract, and when the work was complete and the product delivered, it would have to wait another year for the next contract. This made planning difficult and resulted in a continuous cycle of peaks and valleys in production, leaving us with too many or too few workers.

About 60 percent of our products went to the government, the remainder to the airlines. We had no product for the individual consumer. About every five years the president would raise this issue and arrive at essentially the same solution: develop a consumer product that would use the same machinery, workers, and materials to smooth out the peaks and valleys. Success would mean an end to this problem. Unfortunately, the result was always the same: initial enthusiasm and high hopes followed by a considerable investment, followed by failure and a big loss. Each failure apparently resulted from a different cause, so no one ever considered there might a larger issue.

One year, at our annual sales meeting, we gave each attendee a copy of Drucker's book, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices. In it, Drucker exhorted managers to determine what business they were in. This subject was number one on the agenda, and it soon became obvious why our efforts to enter the consumer market always failed. The products had nothing to do with our core business of providing life support protection for aviators. For example, we entered the market for protective motorcycle helmets, about which we knew nothing except how to produce the helmet. It turned out that what the military valued and what the consumer valued were entirely different. Furthermore, we had no idea how to reach the motorcycle helmet consumer. In the end, the company invested a million dollars, produced a heavy, very protective but very uncomfortable and high-priced motorcycle helmet that no one wanted, and almost went bankrupt trying to introduce it.

Defining Your Business Is No Small Thing

Drucker taught that determining what business you are in is essential to creating an organization's future, and therefore is any leader's primary responsibility. Once that's determined, a lot falls into place. An entire set of decisions follow naturally about how to run any organization.

Accurately defining your business automatically saves time, money, and resources that would otherwise be wasted on something that detracts from, rather than adds value to, your business. It also helps you focus on those opportunities and possibilities that are important to building your business. Just as no leader has enough resources to pursue every opportunity or avoid every threat, until you decide what business you are in, your organization will drift, no matter how effective a leader you otherwise are. This is a constant theme in management and leadership: resources of any kind are always limited. Therefore, leaders must make choices and concentrate their always limited resources where they will do the most good. This is true whether yours is a for-profit business, a nonprofit organization, a government agency, or any other organization. Your staff may be striving with all their abilities to support a direction that can hurt your business simply because they don't have a clear understanding of what the real business is or where it should be going.

Today, we call this definition a "mission statement." Drucker's favorite mission statement, though not recent or short, came from a very old business, Sears Roebuck. Simply stated, it was to be the informed and responsible retailer, initially for the American farmer, and later for the American family. It changed Sears from a struggling mail order house, which was sometimes close to bankruptcy, to the world's leading retailer, all within ten years.

How to Obtain Commitment to the Mission Throughout the Organization

Of course, there is only one leader, and ultimately this leader is responsible for the final mission statement and the business. That said, Peter learned much from the Japanese. He had observed an interesting difference in American and Japanese management practices. American leaders made decisions very quickly but gained little real support for their decisions from leaders at all levels, which caused many of their initiatives to fail.

Japanese leaders made decisions more slowly. This frequently frustrated American leaders negotiating with them. However, once the decision was made, the entire organization was committed to it, and supported it much more than their American counterparts.

Why was this? Drucker found that the Japanese practiced a system known as ringi, where all major decisions had to be reviewed and commented on by managers throughout the company. This could require several cycles and months of feedback and revision. However, the consensus built by ringi resulted in major commitments by leaders at all levels, who all felt ownership in the decision.

I doubt that adopting ringi in all countries would be very effective. During the Japanese management fad of the early 1980s, many U.S. firms tried it. It didn't work. American emphasis on rapid decision making goes back to the frontier days when leaders had to make decisions quickly, and it became ingrained in our culture and the way our leaders operate.

Ideas usually cannot be imported without modification. The cultures and other aspects of leadership and management are different; therefore, that they fail without some modification shouldn't be surprising. Even adopting simple devices may cause problems. For example, traffic signals were invented in England, although the version used today was developed in the United States. Despite their successful use elsewhere, when traffic signals were introduced in Ireland, the Irish were so outraged they actually rioted. Why? Because the red light was on top and the green light on the bottom, and to the Irish, red is the color of Britain; green, Ireland. That red was placed over green was infuriated many Irish people. The solution was to mount the traffic lights horizontally.

Although copying ringi in America didn't work either, Drucker recognized the merit of the idea-in particular, the value of consensus for all organizations-and adapted the concept to involve subordinate leaders, but in different ways than the Japanese.

In the past, meetings attended by all managers, or at least those most relevant to the question, were used to garner...