Social Media | The Drucker Exchange

What Peter Drucker Would Be Reading

May 152012

Peter Drucker

Recent selections from around the web that, we think, would have caught Peter Drucker’s eye:

1. Leadership Lessons From Johann Sebastian Bach: Drawing management principles from music—something Peter Drucker loved to do—Steve Denning writes at Forbes.com about the “overwhelming” musical experience he recently enjoyed: listening to Bach’s Mass in B Minor in the National Cathedral in Washington. “So far as we know, Bach did not set out to compose the work in its entirety,” Denning writes. “Instead he proceeded in an iterative fashion over some 15 years.”

2. To Be More Productive, Limit Interruptions: We know how costly interruptions can be during the workday. Researchers say the effects can be worse than those of pulling an all-nighter. But Leslie Brokaw at the MIT Sloan Management Review’s Innovations blog says it’s not enough to stop others from breaking up your concentration, because sometimes you’re the responsible party. “It’s one thing to deal with people who interrupt you,” she writes. “It’s another thing to deal with your own tendency to interrupt yourself.”

3. To Innovate, Turn Your Pecking Order Upside Down: Even the greatest idea with the greatest brain trust can go wrong if you don’t put the right people on the right tasks. Chris Trimble, writing on the HBR Blog, says one thing to which we’re especially resistant is fiddling with established power structures. But if you want to get something truly innovative done, you can’t afford to leave hierarchies untouched: “To build the right kind of team, for any breakthrough innovation effort, you have to think, quite literally, as though you are building a new company from scratch.”

4. The Dx Comment of the Week: In response to our post “The ROI on That Sheepskin,” in which we asked whether a college degree was still worth the increasingly enormous sums required to pay for it, reader Rob Perhamus had this to say:

Will Bill Gates’s projection that technology will reduce a four-year higher-ed degree from $200,000 to $2,000 over the next 10 years come true? Will universities embrace technology or attempt to defend themselves from Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’? My opinion is that there is no defense. I would hate to be the person who paid $200,000 for a $2,000 degree.

What Peter Drucker Would Be Reading

May 012012

Peter Drucker

Recent selections from around the web that, we think, would have caught Peter Drucker’s eye:

1. Botching the Bomb: Will bad management prevent a nuclear Iran before any outsiders do? Jacques E. C. Hymans makes the case in Foreign Affairs, as he cites one study suggesting that Tehran’s ambitions to build a bomb may well fail because of its emphasis on authoritarian, rather than professional, management. As the study notes: “A loyal person can learn new skills, but it is much more difficult to teach loyalty to a skilled person.”

2. Developing Better Change Leaders: Being a leader means making big and wrenching decisions. But Aaron De Smet, Johanne Lavoie and Elizabeth Schwartz Hioe assert in McKinsey Quarterly that implementing hard decisions, and making changes stick, requires soft skills: “These skills include the ability to keep managers and workers inspired when they feel overwhelmed, to promote collaboration across organizational boundaries, or to help managers embrace change programs through dialogue, not dictation.”

3. Value Added: Maybe we used to think we could do without manufacturing in the modern U.S. economy. No more. Michael Lind and Joshua Freedman of the New America Foundation push for public policies that will encourage the revitalization of the nation’s manufacturing base: “Innovation in the U.S. cannot be severed from domestic production; the two belong to an innovation system whose elements benefit each other and flourish or fail together.”

4. The Dx Comment of the Week: In response to our post “How to Succeed in Mexico Without Really Bribing?,” reader Daniel Pacheco said lay off Wal-Mart:

‘When in Rome do as the Romans do.’ A saying of Saint Ambrose. Wal-Mart deserves no criticism for its behavior in Mexico, as it is following the advice of Saint Ambrose.

The Feedback

Apr 172012

Although we consider every moment spent at the Dx to be a moment well spent, we recognize that not every moment spent online is a moment well spent. So how do our readers beat back information overload and prevent the Internet and social-media sites from swallowing up all their time? This was the question we posted last week.

Reader Sergio wrote that his “Lenten sacrifice this year was to refrain from using social media websites,” even though his use of those sites was almost entirely work-related. He explained:

Over the course of my abstinence I found unhealthy work habits simply faded away. The need-to-know and need-to-share habits promoted by social networks were rechanneled within my workplace instead. This intensified my collaboration with colleagues, and improved the focus and quality of my work. I also finished two books, and generally felt like I was grasping new concepts more effectively.

Spending too much time online is the mark of “crazy” habits, according to reader Alba Patricia Valencia:

Time is a nonrenewable resource and we have short time to live in this existence. When we understand the value of time, we will be more sensible to know how to spend it.

And reader Mike Grayson said that for decades he has been following Drucker’s recommendation to record his time, and the results have been good:

I can say that I have accomplished some pretty aggressive goals, while other goals have been changed because I deem them not worthy of the time it would take to accomplish them. Here is the caveat: I have not always been faithful to the method, but the result is always the same. When I fail to manage my time, my effectiveness drops and I flounder in reaching my goals. When I adhere to the method, I make a great deal of progress toward and often accomplish my goals. The real fight is with my weak human nature.

April 17, 2012
No Responses
Effectiveness, Knowledge work, Social Media

Trivial Pursuit

Apr 132012

Not surprisingly, we feel that applying Peter Drucker’s timeless insights to current events is immensely helpful. But we can’t deny that we do so online—and that’s a place that many people (younger ones in particular) believe is becoming a big time-waster.

In fact, according to a new Gallup poll, 59% of Americans ages 18 to 29 say they spend too much time on the Internet. Fifty-eight percent in that age group, meanwhile, say they spend too much time on their cell phones or smart phones, while 48% make the same admission about social-media sites like Facebook.

Of course, one problem is that so much information (of greatly varying quality) is so easily available, a trend that Drucker began to pick up on in the business world decades ago. “Every professional and every executive . . . suddenly has access to data in inexhaustible abundance,” Drucker wrote in Technology, Management, and Society. “All of us feel—and overeat—very much like the little boy who has been left alone in the candy store.”

The key question is what all of those online overeaters are going to do about it. “It is possible that younger Americans—concerned about their use of time—will attempt to scale back their use of the new technologies,” Gallup’s Frank Newport noted. “On the other hand, recognition of negative aspects of engaging in certain activities doesn’t necessarily mean people are able to stop doing them—as witnessed by those who would like to quit smoking but can’t, and those who would like to lose weight but don’t.”

Illustration credit: Christopher Silas Neal

Drucker, for his part, believed that “it is . . . essential to remedy your bad habits—the things you do or fail to do that inhibit your effectiveness and performance.”

When it comes to managing time, he taught that a good way to be more productive is to record your actual time-use and then analyze it, rethinking and reworking your schedule accordingly.

But people must be prepared to repeat this process frequently because bad habits tend to resurface. “Six months later, they invariably find that they have ‘drifted’ into wasting their time on trivia,” Drucker wrote in The Effective Executive. “Time-use does improve with practice. But only constant efforts at managing time can prevent drifting.”

How about you? What steps do you take to prevent the Internet and social-media sites from swallowing too much of your time?

Connecting the Dots

Apr 132012

A new episode of “Drucker on the Dial” is available today. Host Phalana Tiller talks with MIT professor and author Sherry Turkle about her book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. Tiller also interviews Lisa Gansky, entrepreneur and writer of The Mesh: Why the Future of Business is Sharing. The conversations explore how connectedness through technology is impacting our lives and our organizations.

And Rick Wartzman delivers a piece on how slippery the “truth” and the “facts” can be as he delves into a troubled report on the working conditions at Apple’s main Chinese supplier.

Older Entries