All this merged into an on-going relationship with Dr Al Randall and his colleagues and classmates, during which CIAM students, acting as my consultants, helped me innovate! I was fortunate to work with Dr Randall in both cases, but the unusual thing is that Dr Randall, although he led one team and a year or so later was my prime contact on another, was not the supervising professor in either of these two engagements. The fact is, Dr Randall was also a CIAM student, completing his second master’s, the MBA at CIAM, while serving as a professor and administrator. Through the engagement that he participated in with his classmates, we completed two projects together. This helped my firm penetrate the global market with online consulting and assisted our new non-profit division, The Israeli Smart Cities Institute, to penetrate a foreign market in a third country where there is a desperate need to make cities smarter.
Learning management through applying Drucker’s principles, while consulting to managers of small organizations as well as giant corporations, is a unique feature of CIAM. Consulting involves research and practice – what better way to get people ready to lead in a changing environment where they have to constantly apply theory and to innovate?
Now our relationship with CIAM has moved forward even another significant step. We represent CIAM in Israel, since people can now study with CIAM online in addition to in the classroom in California. Moreover, we are going to start hiring CIAM graduates, as they are already experienced consultants when they graduate, to assist us in our projects. Also, California and Israel have a lot in common – the first Silicon Valley and the second Silicon Valley and the Start-Up Nation – can thus co-create a great future inspired by and based on Peter Drucker’s consulting principles. I love it!
About Edna Pasher
Edna Pasher received her PhD under world-famous Professor Neil Postman at New York University. In 1978, she founded one the leading consulting firms in Israel, Edna Pasher PhD & Associates Management Consultants, of which she remains President and CEO. In 1991, she became a Founding Partner of Status: the Israeli Management Magazine. Five years ago she organized the first event promoting Drucker in Israel, and Status magazine became the first major medium in Israel to devote an entire issue to Drucker. She became a “Drucker client” by proxy when two different teams of MBA students from the California Institute of Advanced Management applied Drucker’s principles to two of her initiatives. Most recently she founded the non-profit International consulting firm, The Israeli Smart Cities Institute.
My Experience with the Drucker Consulting Difference
By C. William Pollard
I had the privilege of knowing Peter Drucker as an advisor, mentor, and friend. We first met in person at a Board of Directors’ meeting of Herman Miller. Peter had been invited by the Chairman to come and speak to us about the growing globalization of our market and its effect on the way we should do business.
Before that time, I had read many of Peter’s books and writings and we had used them extensively in our ServiceMaster training programmes for managers and leaders of the firm.
His talk to the Herman Miller Board was not in the form of a speech, but was more of a dialogue in which he sprinkled his comments with penetrating questions using the Socratic method to not only communicate knowledge, but also to test our understanding. He was a master at it. As I found out later in my one-to-one meetings with him, he would often use the same method to give advice and seek understanding with his clients.
At the end of the board meeting there was an opportunity for us to shake hands and have a personal conversation with Peter. When he discovered I was the CEO of ServiceMaster, he began asking questions about the mission of our firm. He explained that he had studied our company and also was a customer of the firm. He wanted to know more about how we as a public company implemented our unique statement of corporate objectives, “To Honour God in All We Do, To Help People Develop, To Serve with Excellence and To Grow Profitably.” He asked me if I would meet with him and (yes, he even used the word) “consult” with him about how we did it.
In our next meeting and in my many meetings with him thereafter, Peter would always reflect as a person who was as open to learning as he was teaching or advising. He never came across as one who had all the answers. I greatly benefited from his knowledge and wisdom and I brought him many challenging and difficult problems as we faced the opportunity to grow our business at a rate of 20% per year for a period of over 20 years.
As we would get deeply into issues of organizational structure, growth by acquisition into new service areas, and international expansion, he would often remind me of the importance of people development. His interest went beyond what people were doing and how they did it, it included who they were becoming. He viewed this added dimension as a primary responsibility of leadership. A favourite phrase of his was that productive people work for a cause, not just a living. His advice about people reflected his philosophy of life, which included integrating faith with learning and seeking solutions to problems.
As he provided advice and counsel, he often dealt with the specific issue at hand within a context of the broader issues of life. Yes, it was important to be effective and efficient in producing needed goods and services for the customer at a fair price and a bottom line that would create value for the shareholder. But since the success of the firm was dependent on the productivity of people, he also strongly believed that the firm should have the broader objective of becoming a moral community for the development of human character.
I found Peter to be frank and direct when he observed something that was wrong and needed correction. He was able to do this in a way that people would usually respond positively to rather than reject his advice. For me, one of these times included Peter Drucker telling our board of directors that they were all wrong when they responded to his question “what is your business?” by listing the types of services we delivered instead of recognizing the importance of the training and developing of the people delivering the service.
It also included a time he had to stop me in my tracks when I was about to make a wrong decision. He pointed out that I must be suffering from the arrogance of success with a touch of hubris if I proceeded with the decision I was proposing. He suggested my focus was on self instead of others, and it would be best for the firm and its people if I would eat some humble pie and seek a compromise that would resolve the issue. And so I did.
For me the Drucker difference in consulting included:
1. A willingness to mentor as well as consult.
2. Asking the penetrating questions that would help to clarify the issues and confirm understanding.
3. Being prepared to learn from those he advised.
4. Never ignoring the people issues and always determining whether there was a commitment to develop the whole person.
5. Encouraging a vision for the firm to be a moral community for the development of human character.
6. Seeking to develop a relationship of trust with those he advised and, when needed, to be frank about what should be changed.
Peter helped me understand that my leadership of the firm was just a means – to what end was the real question. And the end for Peter was the people that followed, the direction they were headed, and who they were becoming as they produced results for the firm.
About C. William Pollard, Esquire
Bill Pollard is Chairman of Fairwyn Investment Company and the author of two bestselling books. He served twice as Chief Executive Officer of The ServiceMaster Company, a Fortune 500 Company, and also served as chairman of the board. During his leadership of ServiceMaster, the company was recognized by Fortune magazine as the number-one service company among the Fortune 500 and also was included as one of its most admired companies. ServiceMaster was also identified as a “star of the future” by the Wall Street Journal and recognized by the Financial Times as “one of the most respected companies in the world”. Bill Pollard is a member of the Drucker Institute Board and also CIAM’s Bo
ard of Trustees.
Peter Drucker: Consulting and the Multidimensional Life
By Bruce Rosenstein
Peter Drucker was a rare individual who ranked at the top of three different professional fields: consulting, writing, and teaching. This multidimensional career was part of what he called “living in more than one world,” – having a number of activities in your life so you are not over-weighted in any one area. As much success and satisfaction as he received in any one of those areas, my sense is that any one alone would not be enough for a full expression of Drucker as a person and as a professional and this clearly enhanced his role as a management consultant.
On April 11 2005, seven months to the day before he died, I interviewed him at the Drucker Archives in Claremont, California for my first book, Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life. When discussing the importance of priorities in life, he said to me, “My order of priorities is that writing comes first, teaching next, and consulting last.” Yet he maintained a fluid, non-rigid way of looking at life. When I interviewed him in Los Angeles in the summer of 2002 for a feature story in USA TODAY, “Scandals Nothing New to Business Guru: Pioneer of Management Theory Has Seen This Cycle Before,” he expressed it differently: “If you want to diagram my work, in the centre is writing, then comes consulting, then comes teaching. I’ve never been primarily an academic. I like to teach because that’s the way I learn.”
Drucker’s work and learning in any of those three areas inevitably informed and strengthened the others. He built variety into his life as a whole, but also into his consulting practice. He advised business organizations, non-profits, educational institutions, and government agencies. He developed deep relationships with many of his clients. In the USA TODAY interview, he told me, “I keep in touch with all my clients, even if I’ve had no business with them for 20 years; they’re still friends.”
The organizations he consulted for became, in essence, laboratories for his ideas, but also laboratories to observe closely how effectively the organizations were operating, and what their potential could be. Drucker also learned a lot about the future from his interactions with clients, observing how they were creating their own futures.
Although it’s true that Drucker could justify being highly selective about whom he wanted to work with, he had good reasons to turn away prospective clients. Sometimes the work did not require someone at his level. He told one company that they would be better off hiring a good accounting professor in their city. And he would not go against his principles. In the April 2005 interview, he told me that he wouldn’t work with companies or organizations that wanted him “to be a hatchet man, which I refuse to do. I’m no good at it. I don’t believe in it”.
Because Drucker remained relevant during a very long life, people continued to want access to his thinking. Beyond that, they wanted to spend time with him, to be in his presence, trade ideas with and learn from him. During the 2002 USA TODAY interview, he said, “I have more consulting now than ever. I thought I had the most in non-profits. But it turned out I had an enormous amount of old, big-company clients coming back to me. European, Japanese, and American; how to reposition themselves in the world economy.” With a display of subtle, sly humour, he said he enjoyed in particular working with small companies, “where you see results. My first client was General Motors; I started at the top and worked my way down”. Of course he did have many large and prestigious corporate clients over the years, including General Electric and Procter and Gamble.
Yet to really get a sense of the variety of his work, it’s instructive to look at the non-profit clients named in a 2013 book with a considerable amount of material about Drucker as a consultant and adviser: Drucker: A Life in Pictures, by Rick Wartzman, the executive director of the Drucker Institute. The clients ranged from the Girl Scouts of the USA and the American Red Cross to cultural organizations such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Symphony Orchestra League, and educational institutions like the University of Pennsylvania and the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
The variety Drucker built into his work, the attention to people, and the desire to keep achieving at an advanced age can be role-model activities for today’s consultants and other knowledge workers. How can you build your brand, your body of work, and your reputation so people are willing to pay for the privilege of spending time with you? Wouldn’t we all want to remain in demand for the entire span of our working lives?
About Bruce Rosenstein
Bruce Rosenstein has spent the last 20 years studying, writing and speaking about Peter Drucker, including an extensive personal interview Rosenstein conducted in Drucker’s home, one of the last taped interviews Drucker granted prior to his death. Rosenstein’s work has resulted in hundreds of articles, blogs, speeches, and two bestselling books: Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life and Create Your Future the Peter Drucker Way. Prior to this, he spent 21 years preparing for this role working for USA Today as a librarian researcher and writer of business and management books. In April 2011 he became the managing editor of the award-winning Leader-to-Leader Journal of the Frances Hesselbein Leadership Institute.
The Consultant Called Drucker
By Rick Wartzman
Bill Cohen has pointed out, quite correctly, that “despite his extraordinary success,” Peter Drucker “did not establish a major consulting organization supporting or expanding his activities. There was and is no ‘Drucker Consulting Group’ or ‘Drucker and Associates,’ or ‘Drucker LTD’”.
That said, the entity that I have the pleasure and privilege of leading – the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University – is what Drucker did leave behind to carry on his work. And, sure enough, our activities today include consulting for a variety of major companies across a range of industries: technology, retailing, manufacturing, and more.
Moving into consulting has been part of an eight-year process in which we’ve evolved from Drucker’s dusty archives to become an active social enterprise with a mission of “strengthening organizations to strengthen society”.
For us, then, figuring out what made Drucker so sought-after as an adviser to corporate, non-profit, and government executives has been more than a matter of academic interest. It has been the foundation upon which we’ve built a business.
What we’ve come to understand – and have made the core of our own consulting work – is that Drucker didn’t see his job as serving up answers. “My greatest strength as a consultant,” he once remarked, “is to be ignorant and ask a few questions.”
In Drucker’s case, as in ours, these questions are often deceptively simple: Who is your customer? What are you going to stop doing (to free up resources for more highly productive and innovative projects)? What business are you in? Or, as he urged the founders of the investment bank, Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, to ask themselves in 1974, after they had enjoyed a heady period of growth: “What should your business be?”
“I shall not attempt to answer the question of what your business should be,” Drucker added. “First, one should not answer such a question off the top of one’s head. Secondly, one man’s opinion, no matter how brilliant, is at best one man’s opinion.”
Other times, corporations sought Drucker’s counsel to deal with narrower challenges. In 1992, for example, he wrote a 56-page analysis for Coca-Cola that explored distribution, branding, and advertising. Still, the approach was always the same: “This report raises questions,” Drucker told Coke. “It does not attempt to give answers.”
We’ve also come to appreciate the delicate personal balance that Drucker struck as a consultant. He enjoyed close relationships with many of the CEOs and other executives with whom he worked – “Whatever problem a client has is my problem,” Drucker declared – but he would never be mistaken (or mistake himself ) for an insider.
“The professional needs commitment
to the client’s cause… but he must stay free of involvement,” Drucker explained in a 1981 essay titled “Why Management Consultants.” “He must not himself be a part of the problem.” In the end, Drucker asserted, “The management consultant brings to the practice of management what being professional requires: detachment.”
Another thing that made Drucker stand apart was his integrity. He wouldn’t come in, do a job, and bill a client without knowing whether he had made a real difference. “Remember,” Drucker told the assistant to the chairman of Sears, as he turned in an invoice in March 1955, “that this is submitted on condition that there is no payment due unless the work satisfies you.” Indeed, Drucker knew that the test wasn’t whether he had delivered some sharp insight. All that counted was whether his client could use that insight to make measurable progress on an important issue. It’s the performance of others, Drucker wrote, that “determines in the last analysis whether a consultant contributes and achieves results, or whether he is … at best a court jester”.
For our part, we work hard to follow up with our clients and make sure that we’ve delivered genuine value through our consulting practice, which we’ve dubbed “Drucker Un/Workshops”. (They are so named because, through these engagements, we look to catalyze the understanding that will get executives unlocked on a crucial challenge or opportunity).
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