How Do You Define Effective Leadership

  by Ann Barr

“Leadership is lifting a person's vision to higher sights, the raising of a person's performance to a higher standard.” —Peter Drucker

The world lost an intellectual giant last year. Peter Drucker died in November at the age of 95.

He was the father of modern management theory, and has never been equaled or surpassed in terms of his theories or their usability.

Mr. Drucker thought of himself, first and foremost, as a writer and teacher—though he eventually settled on the term "social ecologist."

He became internationally renowned for urging corporate leaders to agree with subordinates on objectives and goals, and then get out of the way of decisions about how to achieve them.  He challenged both business and labor leaders to search for ways to give workers more control over their work environment.

More great quotes about leadership from Peter Drucker:

l "Effective leadership is not about making speeches or being liked—leadership is defined by results, not attributes."

l "Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things."

l "Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes—but no plans.”

l "Quality in a product or service is not what the supplier puts in. It is what the customer gets out and is willing to pay for. A product is not quality because it is hard to make and costs a lot of money, as manufacturers typically believe. This is incompetence. Customers pay only for what is of use to them and gives them value. Nothing else constitutes quality.” 

And this is one quote many employees can relate to:

l "So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work."

Mr. Drucker staunchly defended the need for businesses to be profitable, but he preached that employees were a resource, not a cost. His constant focus on the human impact of management decisions did not always appeal to executives, but they could not help noticing how it helped him foresee many major trends in business and politics.

He began talking about such practices in the 1940s and ’50s, decades before they became so widespread that they were taken for common sense. Mr. Drucker also foresaw that the 1970s would be a decade of inflation, that Japanese manufacturers would become major competitors for the United States and that union power would decline.

Mr. Drucker counseled groups like the Girl Scouts to think like businesses, even though their bottom line was "changed lives" rather than profits. He warned them that donors would increasingly judge them on results rather than intentions. In 1990, Frances Hesselbein, the former national director of the Girl Scouts, organized a group of admirers to honor him by setting up the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management in New York to expose nonprofits to Mr. Drucker's thinking and to new concepts in management.

Mr. Drucker's greatest impact came from his writing. His more than 30 books, which have sold tens of millions of copies in more than 30 languages, came on top of thousands of articles, including a monthly op-ed column in The Wall Street Journal from 1975 to 1995.

His quote on time management is priceless:

"Time is the scarcest resource and, unless it is managed, nothing else can be managed."

Early last year, in an interview with Forbes magazine, Mr. Drucker was asked if there was anything in his long career that he wished he had done but had not been able to do.

"Yes, quite a few things," he said. "There are many books I could have written that are better than the ones I actually wrote. My best book would have been Managing Ignorance, and I'm very sorry I didn't write it."

Are You Looking for New Management Ideas?

If you are a manager now or intend to become a manager, take a look at one of Peter Drucker's best books on management, The Essential Drucker: The Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker's Essential Writings on Management.   The next time you are in your local library or bookstore, pick up this book and you will find dozens and dozens of valuable nuggets of information you can use.

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Ann Barr is a consultant and sales trainer who has

written eight books on sales and marketing
available on her web site www.sellingsupplies.com