The knowledge needed to develop the internet became available in the early 1960s. The knowledge for the internet’s close relation, the personal computer, has been around since 1962. Even ideas not requiring high technology take an amazing amount of time. Consider the marketing plan. Search for examples prior to World War II, and you will come up empty. Post-war articles in the Journal of Marketing began to tout the idea of a marketing plan similar to plans of strategy, which became more familiar during the war. But it took more than 20 years before most organizations began to innovate and adopt the process and produce the marketing plans resulting from it.
What this says is that there is “gold in them thar hills”. That is, there is knowledge uncovered and available today that is the source of innovations, yet unexploited for the future.
Drucker told us that we must innovate. However, he did not leave it at that. He told us what we should avoid and how we should approach innovation to build and maintain the success of our organizations with the best sources of new ideas. Drucker found specific ways to approach innovation, and one commonly held method to absolutely avoid in helping his clients to innovate effectively and successfully. As a consultant, you can help your clients the same way.
1 Drucker, Peter F., Innovation and Entrepreneurship, (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1985) pp. 130-132.
2 Schultz, Harold with Katie Couric, CBS Sunday Morning, 27 March 2011.
3 No author listed, “History of the Light Bulb,” Bulb.com, accessed at http://www.bulbs.com/learning/history.aspx, 18 August 2015.
4 No author listed, “Light Bulb,” Idea Finder, accessed at http://www.ideafinder.com/history/inventions/lightbulb.htm, 18 August 2015.
5 No author listed, “Michael Dell,” Wikipedia, accessed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Dell, 19 August 2015.
6 No author listed, “Fast Growth of Latino Population Blurs Traditional US Racial Lines,” March 17 2013, accessed at http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/fast-growth-latino-population-blurs-traditional-u-s-racial-lines-article-1.1291138, 21 August 2015
7 Bush, Jeb and Jim Hunt, “New Higher Education Model,” Inside Higher Ed, October 6 2011, accessed at https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2011/10/06/bush_hunt_essay_on_why_public_universities_need_to_embrace_online_education, 21 August 2015
8 Sanborn, Josh, “Behind the Messy Science of Police Lineups,” Time, October 3 2014, accessed at http://time.com/3461043/police-lineups-eyewitness-science/, 21 August 2015
9 Moffett, Matt, “Where Can You Find Mermaids? In a School, of Course,” The Wall Street Journal, front page, A8, 28 August 2015.
Chapter 15
Drucker’s Group Consulting and IATEP™
If you work with two or more clients simultaneously, you are engaged in group consulting. Accordingly, workshops, seminars, training, and even plain, good old-fashion classroom teaching are all forms of “group consulting.” A review of Drucker’s career demonstrates that he did an enormous amount of group consulting in his seminars, workshops, classroom teaching, and “A Day with Drucker”, an annual event sponsored by a major Los Angeles graduate school.
Drucker’s Group Consulting
I recall Drucker’s seminars in the Los Angeles area well from when I was his student in the classroom. He was always involved in presentations for various organizations. One of the two largest universities in the Los Angeles area, the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), sponsored an annual event called “A Day with Drucker” for which he was always in demand and immensely popular. He did the same for private organizations and corporations.
Although he invariably stressed application, Drucker was trained in the European method, which relied heavily on the formal lecture. Because of this, it was sometimes more difficult for him to integrate class participation. This was evident even in questions and answers. To his students, it sometimes appeared that it was better not to even volunteer and raise one’s hand to answer a Drucker-posed question until four or five previous volunteers had done so first and their responses rejected as something short of full acceptance. Only then could one venture an answer that might be judged adequate. However, when he didn’t use questions to elicit a “school solution” response, but rather as a stimulus to thinking, he was extremely effective. And as noted in an earlier chapter, his clients were sometimes unfamiliar with being asked these types of questions instead of being given precise instructions as what to do, like they were by other consultants. His procedure also supported his concepts of self-teaching.
If you ventured a theory in your response that was not backed up by observed and quotable facts, you were sure to be challenged. And if you quoted his written work, you’d better be absolutely certain that your quote was accurate. Even then, “quoting Drucker to Drucker” was rarely a good idea.
He sometimes distributed and used case studies in the classroom. These were not quite the case study methodology for which the Harvard Business School is famous, but the basic ideas were definitely similar. Harvard’s claim at the time was that detailed analysis in investigating and finding solutions for multiple cases best prepared graduates for immediately assuming general management responsibilities on graduation. Drucker recognized that application was essential for understanding and constantly reminded us that what we learned was useless unless the knowledge was applied. In this, he was preceded by the ancient Chinese sage, Confucius, who proclaimed: “I hear, I forget; I see, I remember; I do, I understand.” Drucker emphasized the doing and understanding. In his seminars, Drucker usually concluded with a final instruction: “Don’t tell me that you enjoyed my presentation; tell me what you are going to do differently Monday morning.”
Again, regardless of his lectures, or any discomfort with his class discussions on a particular day, he stressed application and action. The doing led to the understanding that he knew was necessary for mastery of what he taught as well as helping the client, or client-student, toward the client’s own frequently highly effective solutions to problems or strategies.
Several years ago, when I was named president of a brand new graduate school, I wanted to implement the best, fastest method that I could for executive students that had little time, but badly needed the information in an advanced degree, and they needed it as quickly as possible. Combining very powerful methods that I had been taught during my military career beginning at West Point, Drucker’s concepts, and other pedagogies developed in some of our research schools, my colleagues and I at the CIAM came up with the method that we called IATEP™.
Immediate Application of Theory for Enhanced Performance (IATEP™)
IATEP™ stands for Immediate Application of Theory for Enhanced Performance. It combines several of Drucker’s most important concepts in a teaching and learning environment:
• The advantages of teaching for self-mastery of a subject
• The unusual value of self-instruction in learning
• Immediate application for a complete understanding
While Drucker had a predecessor in Confucius for the necessity of doing or applying for real understanding, he actually had forerunners in these ideas for all three of these concepts. Nor was Confucius the only example of intellectual thought from ancient times, which predated Drucker’s position on learning.
The Roman Touch
The Roman philosopher, Seneca, was important in laying the groundwork for Drucker’s advice that teaching a subject provided a significant advantage in learning about that subject. Seneca had written millennia earlier precisely that the best way to learn something was to teach it. Drucker repeated that assertion: “No one learns as much about a subject as one who is forced to teach it.” The advantages of teaching for learning became apparent to him as he began to consult and to conduct group consulting.
The final element in Drucker’s model is the example of his own self-education. Recall from chapter two that Drucker did not formerly attend a university and study management, and he most definitely did not study social ecolo
gy, the practice that he particularly claimed in later years, in a classroom. He formally studied law at the University of Hamburg and obtained his doctorate in international law at the University of Frankfurt. He never formally studied management. So how did he get to be the “father of modern management”? In three words: “He taught himself.” That’s the third Drucker concept in this important model.
This third concept is critical, because teaching oneself is an amazingly effective method with great potential that has not been as much used as it should be in either consulting or learning. Drucker used it when he asked clients questions—recall his famous two questions of Jack Welch when Welch became head of GE: “What businesses would you get rid of if you could and which would you keep? And since you can, what are you going to do about it?”
What is IATEP™?
IATEP™ is a system that I developed for use at the CIAM shortly after I cofounded the school in 2010. In appeared that teaching in a group setting bore a close to group consulting. IATEP™ was developed to optimize Drucker’s three concepts for group consulting in a classroom setting. We were going to demand a lot in our MBA; we – and our students – needed all the help that could be supplied. My “official” definition is “an advanced learning and teaching model whereby performance is permanently enhanced through self-instruction, understanding, and immediate application of theory to action.”
Today, a “flipped classroom” is considered a revolutionary concept in teaching and learning. Yet it merely combines blended online work with a basic method that was first proposed and adopted in an academic setting more than 100 years ago. More about that shortly. Through this 19th century development, I learned some important things that I have integrated and combined with Drucker’s original ideas.
The method used in almost all models of teaching since the Middle Ages requires a teacher lecturing to an awed group of students to impart knowledge. In the “flipped classroom”, this basic element is flipped. The students, after having taught themselves a subject away from the classroom, demonstrate their knowledge to the professor or the leader of the group consulting and others present by recitation and demonstration. The “flipped classroom” has received a lot of publicity recently, but it is far from new.
IATEP™ incorporates one final element that improves on Drucker’s basic concepts, but is nevertheless a crucial component and completes the process started by the other elements of self-teaching, learning, and demonstration in the classroom and the real world. This final element is most important for absolute mastery. Drucker used his own examples as case studies for class discussion. He did this as effectively as anyone could. Yet the case study methods, as discussion or not, is a simulated method. So it has one weakness, which is nevertheless significant. It is bloodless. Student don’t encounter realistic problems in any situation, such as difficult clients and teammates, misunderstandings, misinformation, technology that doesn’t work as advertised, the weather, even erroneous solutions introduced by persuasive classmates, and countless other elements in the environment that may prevent the execution of an otherwise best solution and strategy in any given situation. However, through incorporating the practice of actual consulting for real organizations into learning, the real challenge of theory implementation becomes clear. This real-world application of Drucker’s principles and theories adds a dimension useful in training or educational group consulting.
The “Flipped Classroom” and the Implications of the Basic Model
One can look at Drucker as a “finished” genius whose work cannot be improved on. My view is that we stand on the shoulders of a genius like Drucker. So I’d like to spend a few minutes looking at the concept of the “flipped classroom” and show how it ties in with Drucker’s concept of learning best by teaching, which itself came from ancient predecessors and how we can build on Drucker’s consulting ideas.
A few months ago, our new librarian received an e-mail promoting a “revolutionary” system of academic instruction for graduate business programmes known as a “flipped classroom”. Much to my surprise, I found that the whole concept incorporated many of the ideas that are a part of IATEP™. Naturally I Googled the term “flipped classroom”. I discovered that in 2008, two high school chemistry teachers in Colorado, Jonathan Bergmann and Aaron Sams, sought to find the time to reteach lessons for absent students. They hit on lectures posted online. This proved not only successful for review, but for absent students as well. The basic idea was to stand the usual instructional approach on its head, for students not to have to depend on in-class lectures or the instructor’s teaching, so that they could teach themselves ahead of time outside of the classroom. In class they demonstrate their knowledge through examination or engage in exercises or collaborative learning. One main point is that the scarce resource of time is maximized, and the basic concept really has little to do with today’s technology, although it is certainly helped by it.1
More reading on my part uncovered the fact that the “flipped classroom” had to do with the “Thayer Method”. This got my immediate attention. I am a West Pointer. Colonel Sylvanus Thayer is called the “father of the military academy”, the United States Military Academy being the official name by which West Point, my alma mater, is known. West Point is the original source on which IATEP™ is partially based. Colonel Thayer (technically he could be referred to as Brigadier General Thayer since he was promoted to that rank as a special honour a day before his retirement) was one of the early graduates from West Point, having graduated in the seventh class in 1808. He is still the longest-serving Superintendent of West Point, having served from 1817 to 1833. In those 17 years, he completely remade the institution. The importance of Thayer’s tenure and the instruction methods he developed are confirmed by the fact that they are still utilized at West Point today.
Until Thayer, the academy was subjected to the influence of politics and mismanagement, which involved everything from who was accepted, who graduated, and even how long a term one was required to remain a cadet until graduating.
The age of cadets varied between 10 and 37, as there was no specific age for admission, or even educational level. I recall hearing that even a candidate who couldn’t operate a firearm because of physical handicap (he only had one arm) was admitted as a cadet in those early days. Thayer got everything into order. Cadets took a prescribed course of instruction and graduated only after successfully completing the required courses over a certain period of time. There were required physical and mental standards for admission. The US was young and engineers were needed, so Thayer established West Point as the first engineering school in the country, and like it or not, every cadet studied engineering. Graduates built railway lines, bridges, harbours, roads, the Panama Canal, the Pentagon, and supervised the development of the atomic bomb. But maybe Thayer did something else. Could this be the same Thayer referred to in “The Thayer Method?” I Googled further and discovered that this was exactly the same Thayer who was also the “father of the military academy”.
The Thayer Method
As I said earlier, being a West Point graduate, I knew exactly what the Thayer Method had to refer to. Let me give you a sampling. My first semester as a cadet and the first day in mathematics class, the professor showed us six hardbound textbooks. He held up each book in turn, announcing as he did each title: “College Algebra, Plane Trigonometry, Spherical Trigonometry, Plane Geometry, Solid Geometry, Calculus.” Of the last, he said, “We’ll only get through the first few chapters in Calculus. But by Christmas break you’ll have completed every page and worked every problem of the other five books.” We thought he was joking. He was not.
We had already received a schedule before our first class and, as he had stated, we now saw that every chapter of every book was covered and that a number of sample problems were suggested for us to ensure that we had mastered an understanding of the material.
He then asked, “Any questions regarding the first lesson?” I don’t think there were
any because we all assumed that the professor would teach us what we needed to know. We were all wrong. Did I say earlier that those two high school innovators copying Thayer’s methods found out how to overcome the scarcity of time? I guess that they did.
Let me now jump ahead to a description written by a doctoral student about his professor who had taught at West Point as a visiting professor:
“In describing his experience teaching at West Point, Dr Stapell started by describing the first rule that West Point teachers are given – you’re not allowed to lecture – at all! What? Isn’t that what college teaching is? And wouldn’t you expect a place with such a military history and an authoritarian approach to underscore this traditional teaching method – of having one expert individual lecture and provide information to a bunch of young, dutiful students? They don’t lecture at West Point? At all? … according to Dr Stapell, this educational method is 100% activity-based.”2
Returning to 1955 and my own mathematics professor’s introduction, he then told us, “You will teach yourself the material required for every lesson in every class.” When you come to class I will ask if there are any questions about the material. If there are, I will answer them and provide the answers to your questions. When all questions are answered, you will each be assigned problems to work in class based on the lesson. They will not be the same as those recommended that you solve. All cadets will be given a limited amount of time to develop solutions to these problems, which you will all develop simultaneously on the blackboards. There are 15 of you and there are exactly 15 boards. When I give the command, cease work, you will stop all writing. I will then call on different cadets to explain the solutions to me and the class. I will grade all solutions every day after your class is dismissed, so you will both recite and be graded every day. I strongly advise you to work every problem and make certain that you understand the solution. You are responsible for teaching yourself and you will be graded every day.”
Consulting Drucker Page 23
