Inside Drucker's Brain

The most accessible guide to the essential ideas of "the inventor of modern management".

In late 2003, ninety-four-year-old Peter Drucker invited Jeffrey Krames to his home for an unprecedented day-long interview. He spoke candidly about his seminal management principles, his enormous body of work (thirty-eight books over six decades), and the leaders he had advised over the years (including Jack Welch).

Krames used the insights he gained that day to create "Inside Drucker's Brain"—a compact guide to the great man's wisdom. Krames had no intention of writing a biography, but rather a book that would showcase Drucker's most important ideas and strategies, and explain why they are just as useful today as they were decades ago

Inside Drucker's Brain

A view of the education landscape

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An extended landscape view

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Learning has addition thoughts by Peter Drucker. Find education, teaching, and learning related topics in Drucker's books.

The future of America lies between the ears of Americans and I'm not just talking about subject knowledge.

Lasting Value: Lessons from a Century of Agility at Lincoln Electric

Joe's Journal: On Bringing More Knowledge to Manufacturing

A while back, I wrote the book Lasting Value, which featured the stories of such high-productivity U.S. manufacturing companies as Lincoln Electric and the steelmaker NUCOR

 Amazon book page

In its 104-year history, Lincoln Electric Company has managed to sustain its status as the world's leader in welding technology despite intense domestic and foreign competition. The company's success can be attributed to founder James Lincoln, who began adopting principles of management that empowered workers and allowed the company to change rapidly to take advantage of new opportunities. This book shows you how to duplicate these pioneering ideas and follow the brilliance of the Lincoln management system. The results of this system include happier customers, more prosperous workers, and richly rewarded shareholders. 

... Joseph Maciariello uncovers Lincoln's approach to management in a systematic manner and demonstrates why the company has been so effective for over a century. You'll discover how Lincoln employs a mutually reinforcing set of management systems that creates a boost in overall performance. When these systems are described and understood in their entirety, you'll see how the company's sustained success is due to its natural development of agility. You'll findout how this agility is connected to its executive leadership, management systems, and cultural environment. And you'll learn how to utilize these principles and techniques in your own company to obtain similar results. 

... By implementing this system, you can also experience these strong financial returns for shareholders, an increase in wages for workers, higher productivity, and much more!
"Lasting Value is that rarest of books: a "why to" book, a "what to" book, and a "how to" book- its examples deal with manufacturing companies and blue-collar workers. But the lessons have particular force for the new job facing management: building organizations of knowledge workers who perform and who create lasting value." — Peter F. Drucker 

"In today's world of quarterly expectations and Wall Street's praise for major restructuring, Lasting Value successfully illustrates that long-term shareholder value can occur when corporations are truly customer and employee driven with the highest of motives."

I just bought a copy.

Technology as human work

From chapter three of Technology, Management and Society by Peter Drucker

Man, alone of all animals, is capable of purposeful, nonorganic evolution; he makes tools. This observation by Alfred Russell Wallace, codiscoverer with Darwin of the theory of evolution, may seem obvious if not trite. But it is a profound insight. And though made some seventy or eighty years ago, its implications, have yet to be thought through by biologists and technologists. 

One such implication is that from a biologist's (or a historian's) point of view, the technologist's identification of tool with material artifact is quite arbitrary. Language, too, is a tool, and so are all abstract concepts. This does not mean that the technologist's definition should be discarded. All human disciplines rest after all on similarly arbitrary distinctions. But it does mean that technologists ought to be conscious of the artificiality of their definition and careful lest it become a barrier rather than a help to knowledge and understanding. 

This is particularly relevant for the history of technology, I believe. According to the technologist's definition of "tool," the abacus and the geometer's compass are normally considered technology, but the multiplication table or table of logarithms is not. Yet this arbitrary division makes all but impossible the understanding of so important a subject as the development of the technology of mathematics. Similarly the technologist's elimination of the fine arts from his field of vision blinds the historian of technology to an understanding of the relationship between scientific knowledge and technology.… snip, snip … For scientific thought and knowledge were married to the fine arts, at least in the West, long before they even got on speaking terms with the mechanical crafts: … snip, snip …  

Even within the technologist's definition of technology as dealing with mechanical artifacts alone, Wallace's insight has major relevance. The subject matter of technology, according to the Preface to History of Technology, is "how things are done or made"; and most students of technology, to my knowledge, agree with this. But the Wallace insight leads to a different definition: the subject matter of technology would be "how man does or makes." As to the meaning and end of technology, the same source, again presenting the general view, defines them as "mastery of his (man's) natural environment." Oh no, the Wallace insight would say (and in rather shocked tones): the purpose is to overcome man's own natural, i.e., animal, limitations. Technology enables man, a landbound biped, without gills, fins, or wings, to be at home in the water or in the air. It enables an animal with very poor body insulation, that is, a subtropical animal, to live in all climate zones. It enables one of the weakest and slowest of the primates to add to his own strength that of elephant or ox, and to his own speed that of the horse. It enables him to push his life span from his "natural" twenty years or so to threescore years and ten; it even enables him to forget that natural death is death from predators, disease, starvation, or accident, and to call death from natural causes that which has never been observed in wild animals: death from organic decay in old age. 

These developments of man have, of course, had impact on his natural environment—though I suspect that until recent days the impact has been very slight indeed. But this impact on nature outside of man is incidental. What really matters is that all these developments alter man's biological capacity—and not through the random genetic mutation of biological evolution but through the purposeful nonorganic development we call technology. 

What I have called here the "Wallace insight," that is, the approach from human biology, thus leads to the conclusion that technology is not about things: tools, processes, and products. It is about work: the specifically human activity by means of which man pushes back the limitations of the iron biological law which condemns all other animals to devote all their time and energy to keeping themselves alive for the next day, if not for the next hour. The same conclusion would be reached, by the way, from any approach, for instance, from that of the anthropologist's "culture," that does not mistake technology for a phenomenon of the physical universe. We might define technology as human action on physical objects or as a set of physical objects characterized by serving human purposes. Either way the realm and subject matter of the study of technology would be human work.

Amazon link: Technology, Management and Society 

Peter Drucker was a social ecologist.

Barriers to Innovation

The first barrier is the general confusion over innovation and entrepreneurship. There are people who know something about it and people who sling the words around without the slightest investigation or understanding. They then use their "man on the street" assumptions in their thinking and decisions which have a high probability of failure.

The other main barriers are covered in Innovation and Entrepreneurship and Management, Revised Edition (search for the word stems "innovat" and then "entrepren")