Advice From The Paradigm Shifters Part 1

I have been busy fighting with Grammarly. Work that I am getting ready for a new addition is constantly brutalised by it. Unfortunately, it is mostly right.

Revisiting the paradigm shifters has given me a greater appreciation of their timeless advice, which I will share with you in this series.

Peter Drucker’s wisdom

Difference between management and leadership

Management is ensuring that staff are doing things right, and leadership is ensuring that staff are doing the right thing. He talked about the need for more orchestration-based leadership

Recruitment is a life-and-death decision

Drucker emphasizes the importance of getting the right people on the bus and that it deserves time and effort. Recruiting should be treated as the most important activity a manager does.

Do not give new staff new assignments.

He referred to these jobs as widow makers. Jobs where the incumbent did not have a chance to succeed.

The scarce resource in an organization is performing people.

Drucker highlighted that these scarce resources need to be specifically monitored and not taken for granted. Their goals should be hard enough to stretch them and keep them interested.

Outstanding performance is inconsistent with a fear of failure.

What everybody knows is frequently wrong.

Make obsolete your past success.

Drucker is saying that we need always to look forward and recognize that the cash cows of today will be overtaken by technology.

Abandonment

“The first step in a growth policy is not to decide where and how to grow. It is to decide what to abandon. In order to grow, a business must have a systematic policy to get rid of the outgrown, the obsolete, the unproductive.”

“Don’t tell me what you’re doing. Tell me what you’ve stopped doing.”

Measuring the extent of innovation and abandonment will help focus management’s attention on these two important areas. Abandonment is a sign that management is recognizing that some initiatives will never work as intended, and it is better to face this reality sooner than later.

Have an outside-in focus on your business

See the operation from your customers’ perspective. Especially your important customers’ perspectives.

Collaboration with other organizations, even your competitors

Jack Welch turned General Electric into a powerhouse by striving to focus on what GE was good at. This led Jack Welch to follow Drucker’s advice that “Your backroom is someone’s front room.” In other words, if others can do a job better, then you can subcontract to them rather than diverting energy to be good at everything, a task that is impossible to achieve. We thus need to measure the extent to which we are utilizing this opportunity.

What information do I need to do my job? From whom? When? and how?

By asking these basic questions, we can streamline much of the reporting formats;. Dispensing with those reports that add no value.

Importance of self-renewal

Drucker was always preaching to executives constantly to grow their knowledge and experiences. He was a supporter of having a second passion, outside work, as he recognized the self–renewal benefits of such a work-life balance.

Have three test sites

Drucker pointed out that to do one test site was never enough.

Do what you are good at (look to your strengths)

Peters and Waterman said, “Stick to your knitting,” Jim Collins said, “focus on your flywheel.”

Execution first and always

Drucker, like all the other writers, did not follow the model of planning in such detail that the execution of steps was seen as a secondary event.

Place people according to their strengths

Drucker was adamant that you focus on what people can do rather than focus on what they cannot do well.

Generate three protégés for senior positions.

Drucker was adamant that the CEO and the senior management team should be homegrown.

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