Honoring Peter Drucker: Leadership, Management, and the Path to Greatness
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Introduction
In the ever-evolving landscape of leadership and management, Peter Drucker's timeless insights continue to resonate. This discussion explores the impact of Drucker's ideas on modern organizations and leadership, revealing the principles that can guide us through challenges and uncertainties in today's world.
The Legacy of Peter Drucker
Peter Drucker was not just a management guru; he was a visionary thinker whose principles transformed businesses and societies. His emphasis on the power of effective management over charismatic leadership serves as a crucial reminder in today's fast-paced world.
Embracing a More Human Approach to Management
Drucker's work consistently highlighted the importance of valuing people within organizations. A management style that prioritizes individual wellbeing alongside organizational goals fosters engagement and productivity.
- Compassion in Leadership: Drucker believed that great management must pair performance with compassion, emphasizing the human aspect of leadership.
- Empowerment at All Levels: His principles encourage empowerment, urging leaders to delegate and trust their teams to foster innovation.
The Role of Conversations in Intellectual Growth
Drucker believed strongly in the power of conversational exchange as a means of expanding knowledge and leadership effectiveness.
Cultivating a Collaborative Environment
At institutions like Claremont, facilitated discussions create fertile ground for new ideas and solutions:
- Dialogue Over Monologue: Engaging stakeholders promotes diverse viewpoints and stimulates creative problem-solving.
- The Essence of Learning Organizations: Effective discourse shapes learning organizations that can adapt to change and nurture continual improvement.
The Challenge of Developing Level 5 Leaders
Understanding Level 5 Leadership
Drucker's insights into leadership hierarchy showcase a model where true leadership transcends charisma. Level 5 leaders demonstrate:
- Humility: Leaders channel ambition into the broader mission of their organization.
- Resilience: In facing adversity, they remain steadfast and focused on long-term success.
Questions to Guide Future Leaders
As we strive to build the next generation of leaders, several critical questions arise:
- How do we develop more Level 5 leaders?
- What frameworks can we create to instill humility and purpose in leadership?
- How can we cultivate environments that nurture young, ambitious leaders?
Values as Guiding Stars
The Importance of Core Values
Drucker's teachings remind us that success is grounded in abiding principles. Companies founded on strong core values often outlast their competitors during turbulent times.
- Defining Personal Values: Individuals should articulate their values, which guide their decisions and careers, ensuring alignment with their purpose.
- Protecting Core Values in Leadership: As leaders, upholding these values in every decision fosters a trustworthy and resilient organization.
Preparing for Future Challenges
The Stockdale Paradox
Drucker's legacy encourages us to embrace uncertainty. Drawing from Admiral Stockdale's experiences:
- Faith vs. Optimism: One must maintain unwavering belief in eventual success while confronting harsh realities.
- Resilience in Leadership: Cultivating a strong mental framework prepares leaders to adapt to unforeseen challenges.
Facing Global Instability
In our journey towards building resilient organizations, we must recognize the complexities of a changing world. Teaching the next generation to respond proactively in turbulent circumstances becomes essential.
Personal Growth Through Self-Leadership
Finding Your Personal Hedgehog Concept
Drucker's concept of the three circles—which intertwines passion, skills, and economic value—serves as a guide for individuals seeking fulfillment.
- Pursuing Passion with Purpose: Striving for roles that resonate personally leads to enriched experiences and innovative contributions.
Practical Steps for Emerging Leaders
- Build a Personal Board of Directors: Surround yourself with individuals who inspire and challenge you.
- Prioritize Thought and Reflection: Dedicate time for quiet contemplation to foster creativity and strategy.
- Practice Active Listening: Increase your questions-to-statements ratio in conversations to deepen understanding and relationships.
- Consciously Create a Stop-Doing List: Regularly evaluate and eliminate practices that do not align with your values and goals.
- Prepare for Opportunities: Stay adaptable while recognizing that not every opportunity is aligned with your vision.
Conclusion
In honoring Peter Drucker, we not only reflect on his contributions but also commit to applying his teachings in our personal and professional lives. The essence of Drucker's legacy lies in the pursuit of usefulness through active engagement in our communities and professions. By embodying these principles, we honor his memory and contribute meaningfully to a robust and compassionate society. Let's move forward and make ourselves useful, as Drucker would have wanted us to do.
here uh with you and to be really among friends friends like uh Bob Buford and John Bachman uh with Rick wartzman and
Ira Jackson and the wonderful things they're doing with the school and The Institute uh which I applaud and I
expect remarkable things to come uh with friends from The Faculty uh and also uh to be among a uh a kind of a a role
model friend from afar which is uh Dora strucker and uh it's interesting because I was talking with my wife Joanne on the
phone uh this morning about uh chatting briefly last night with with Doris and we were just talking about how we always
looked at I've always looked at of course uh Peter as a great role model uh but I also uh always have admired uh
their marriage their relationship also as a role model and we were saying yeah you know if you look at that kind of a
role model we've been married now 29 years um and we got engaged 4 days after our first date and uh and we were saying
with that role model in mind uh 29 years is really nothing other than just a nice start so uh it's also really a priv to
be here in the uh environment of Claremont uh in the drer school because I actually think that that that there it
plays a very important role role in the world of thinking and of academics and this idea of it being a place for
conversations right a place for conversations and a place for conversations on important topics that
matter and of course we know that that's exactly how Peter director interacted was through that constant series of
conversations and the idea of having that as an entire ethos of an institution and I think that's a very
important Legacy of uh both Peter Ducker and uh of the institution and so it is a a privilege
uh to try to contribute to that in some small way uh here today I have been asked to uh honor
Peter uh not by Looking Back and articulating all the ways in which he was a great man and of course he was a
that lens building upon some Timeless principles but before I do that I would like to set a context a bit and to to
in his comments and I and I've reflected on this a lot and I believe it is true the idea that uh Peter duer
contributed more to the Triumph of freedom and free Society over totalitarianism as anyone in the 20th
century including perhaps Winston Churchill and that may sound like an audacious statement but as I think about
pen and those who use the pen rewire the brains of those who wield the swords there are people of ideas and people of
of action and Peter chose the pen and really for for free Society to function uh we absolutely must
have high- performing and self-managed organizations spread throughout society and it's really actually the reason why
we're able to have this great melee called democracy what was it that Churchill said is absolutely the most
hideous awful uh completely irrational inefficient form of government ever devised except for all
thing after we've tried everything else but if you think about it that there's a n a natural
inconsistency in in Democratic systems and nothing great happens in the context of inconsistency so what's the solution
to that the solution to that is that spread throughout and people like city managers and people in nonprofits and
people in business corporations and people in organizations they are the ones who lead and manage in a way that
produce the consistency that produce Real Results and it is only the relationship between those two between
the consistent well-managed individual organizations that might now be creating movements with the kind of inherent
inconsistency of democracy which allows us to have freedom that we get a workable combination and of course
Rucker gave us the language the metaphor the lens the understanding of the role of management as the critical
function has become fashionable in uh recent years to um Revere the idea of leadership which I think is great but to
kind of implicitly denigrate the idea of management and and the idea behind uh you'll have people who will kind of
think of it is that the leaders are the ones who are cool right the leaders are the ones who we all want to be the
leaders we want to have the black leather jacket and the and the cool sunglasses and we want to lead and we
want to be you know charismatic and we want to be all these things and kind of the managers like you know well that's
nothing could be further from the truth leadership without effective management and especially as Rick Warren
mentioned last night charismatic leadership without effective management is not only ineffective it is
dangerous but of course Dr knew this and pointed it out more than 60 years ago and if we think that the world is
permanently and irrevocably beyond the reach of totalitarian dictators that freedom will always
Triumph never with a step backward I would simply remind us of our history it is not on our
side most of the world's most dangerous and Powerful totalitarian States came long after 500 BCE
Greece which was the birth prace of the notion of the Republic and the democracy and look what happened in
between there is no law that says it is an inevitable march to free society and I believe that free Freedom
Society in my own first encounter with uh ducker's contribution uh it really came through a research lens and my
colleague Jerry poris and I were engaged in a research project at Stanford where we were trying trying to understand what
separated truly enduring great companies from others over long periods of time and we were going back into historical
archives uh so for example of companies like hulet Packard and MC and Motorola and Johnson and Johnson and General
Electric and and we were studying these companies over the long course of their evolution and so you'd be going through
boxes of archived material at places like HP and you actually have David Packard's original typewritten notes
from the very very first meeting August 23rd 1937 at 2 p.m. in the afternoon when he and Bill huet got together to
form huet Packard by the way there's a very interesting little side note on that it's very fun um they didn't know
what they were going to make which I've always just loved uh they uh uh they get together and say we decided to form a
company in the radio electronics and electrical engineering field very broadly defined and then it goes on to
say the question of what we will Design manufacture and sell however was postponed and this is the founding of
the company but if you think of it it's it was a very drer like approach because what they essentially were saying is our
organization with values it will do remarkable things but that is our creation not a product not a spe though
all that stuff changes and as we started looking inside these organizations and we were studying
them and I I was not particularly familiar with ducker's work as in in depth kept coming across these notes and
HP waving a practice of management and giving a sermon to all of the people about what you're going to do if you go
Packard in 195 7 before they went public CU he said we're going to have pressures of the markets if we go public so what
we have to do is we have to be very clear what we are before we hit that pressure writes down what later became
the basis of the HP way but was really what he called these 10 objectives objectives where's the word objectives
hulet Packard company it should have been the hulet Packard Drucker company HPD and this was true across many of the
companies that we studied and want I realize is there was these intellectual fingerprints at
pivotal stages of these Enterprises and as we were struggling with what to name the book that came out of this U we
tossed aside 125 titles in frustration our publisher was going nuts cuz we just kept vetoing
all of our titles finally I just blurred it out one day why don't we just name it drer was right and we're
done and we ended up calling it uh built to last which of course uh he was the interesting thing we talk about
this question of Drucker now more than ever um I don't believe that that is just a slogan in any
way it is an empirical fact from our research this is not a perspective it's not a philosop it is an empirical fact
that if you look systematically at those that became great in contrast to those that do not and you look at those that
were great that lost it that fell and you ask the question two choices those that get those get in uh
B because they fail to implement with excellent the Timeless principles we already know to be
true the answer is very clearly be it is very hard to argue that the financial crisis we went through is
management I believe that Peter's impact and others may have different views this is just my
approach that has had a huge influence on the way I like to think about ideas and others have had to think about ideas
and I think this Approach at least the the part that H kind of jumped out at me has four parts to
is not necessarily quantitative data what I mean is you go out and you look as he always talked about look out the
window see what's actually out there don't try to think what the world should be look at what the world actually is
and based upon that empirical observation then to derive insights you look out there then derive Theory rather
than deriving Theory and looking out and trying to make the world fit your theory I think this is why he always
loved to interact with people Bob told the story last night about meeting with the uh early mega church leaders they
weren't called that at that time and it's because I think that's where he was getting empirical evidence and and when
I asked him I said why do you consult why do you work with companies you he said that's my laboratory
if you look at the the other great thinkers like Darwin they were also empirical I mean you read pages and
pages and pages about pigeons but from which comes a single elegant idea that was ducker's approach as well
number two he started first and always with results asking a simple question question what actually works and then
asking the question why does it work I recall a conversation I had with a faculty member uh when I was teaching at
Stanford and uh we were discussing people that had influenced our thinking and I said well I really admire Peter
Ducker and his faculty member had an absolutely remarkable response which was he kind of wrinkled his nose in this
kind of disdainful response and a drer oh but he's so practical I think Peter drer would have loved
that he's so practical but it's it was never just kind of the details of the moment if you
pick up a copy of concept of the corporation you don't go into it and say this is a how-to book on build how to
build a corporation it was by going into the real empirical and the real practical aspects of things but then
had with uh uh another role model and person I admired greatly John Gardner uh who wrote self-renewal and leadership
and Secretary of health education and Welfare in the Johnson Administration and John Gardner um when I was talking
with him about do I want to do a a full traditional academic career and end up doing a type of research that would lead
me into that kind of normal path he said that would be fine it' be a good use of your brain
but be aware of what has tended to happen Beware of the tendency to answer questions of increasing irrelevance
with increasing precision and I believe that the what what duer had the courage to do was to
say you know not all important questions can be answered with increasing Precision but it doesn't prevent you
productive but more productive and more Humane and then finally the great signature of it all and I'll return to
this at the end because I'm going to go to the questions aspect here is that everything was infused with a a
tremendous compassion and deep concern for the well-being of the individual you know if you built
companies that destroyed people if you built well-managed organizations and destroyed human beings
in the process this would be a failure and I'm going to return to the individual aspect here maybe towards the
end uh shy hands how many young people do we have here I have to be careful I find young I keep changing that as I go
along but just for okay I'm not going to say young or old but how many are under the age of 30 in this room wonderful at
the end you and I are going to have a little chat at least for a bit I have some thoughts for you I've
brought okay so what I would like to do is to um uh spend a few minutes in this notion of looking
forward teeing up some questions I don't know if I have real good answers for these questions but
what might be questions that I don't know if Peter would ask them today or not but they're questions that occur to
time and uh I brought about 10 but we'll have enough time for three or four the first question that occurs to
comparing those that did something exceptional and built a great company in contrast to others that did
not and I had always at the very beginning of that process discounted the role of the individual leader it always
struck me as a great plug figure right it basically said when we said it's all leadership we basically were saying
we're ignorant because what we say is well we believe the answer is leadership if something was successful it must have
been great leadership we went in a circle what did we learn and so I said to the good to Great research team as
we're embarking on the research we will not have a leadership answer in good to Great which is of course highly
conducive to their freedom of thought and uh I have this strange genetic need to surround myself with young people who
really don't care what I think and uh as the great uh Professor Hal levit uh used to like to say the the um the best
students are those who never quite beli they're professors so one day I walked into the research
team meeting the whole team had joined hands and I thought well that's a little different what's up and they said today
Jim is the day we've decided to tell you that you are wrong what about about this anti- leadership bias that you have see
if we look at the companies that really made these good to Great Leaf you can't take the leaders out of the equation I
mean to remove cork Walgreen from the Walgreens story or Coleman mockler from the Gillette story or dick from
the Wells Fargo story is to ignore the data you tell us to pay attention to the data not to you we invoke that here
companies the companies that didn't make it they also had leaders they had leadership would anyone on the team like
to argue that leak coko was not a leader Chrysler is a comparison company anybody want to argue that Jack eard of
eard was not a leader but eard was a comparison company you cannot say that the differential was leadership they
both had leadership it's like an equation numerator denominator crosses out goes away wrote it on the Whiteboard
sat down and said let's go do something useful and the team their hands tightened and they said we thought you
would say that that and we did our homework and this is when the research team had a really
leaders but the good to great leaders were different than the comparisons they wore they had different
leadership is a Ser a hierarchy of capabilities and level one is about individual capabilities level two is
about your ability to play well with others right team capabilities level three is good competent effective
management level four is then to blend that with the ability to set Direction and to lead but there is a level that
truly exceptional the true great winners who did this was not their great animist it was their
themselves and it wasn't about them so really interesting talking to Rick Warren last night the first line of his
book right it's not about you well that's a that's a a a religious book we're doing an empirical
study drawing upon thousands of years of combined historical and statistical were selecting based on stock
returns we find the same sentence they understood it's not about you when I look at some of the people
who have been associated with this event people like Bob Buford and John Bachman and Francis hesslein and Rick Warren
five I worry and my question is which way are we going as a society are we going down to where
increasingly it's going to be those who are ambitious primarily for themselves who will be the dominant
strain or will it be the level fives who will be the dominant strain if it's the for former we go the
choice and when you look inside as we've had the privilege to do at even difficult things like education where we
had the privilege to study what separated schools the center for future of Arizona did this I just happened to
be sort of the thesis adviser looking at schools in poor Latino neighborhoods public schools with all of the
constraints of public schools and yet some managed to to beat the odds and to overperform and to deliver outstanding
educational results for those kids and you compare them to other schools that are in the exact same circumstances with
the exact same constraints and the exact same teachers unions and the exact same limited budgets and the same kinds of
communities who don't overperform the answer cannot be their circumstances and what was really
different was that in every one of those schools there was a level five leader like Julie Tate Peach who took
responsibility to make her school in Yuma Arizona a pocket of greatness that would deliver outstanding results and I
got into an argument with a senator of the United States of America at a session I had a privilege to do with a
group of senators about education and it was an argument back and forth and the senator was arguing the most important
thing is to increase the budget and my response is if you increase the budget three-fold but you don't have an army of
Education how do we have level five leaders deployed into those principles that's how we make it work and how do we
build armies and of course that's what Claremont is all about now let me give you a hopeful side because I think
there's a lot of dark side of this it's pretty hard to argue that what we've watched in the last year is principally
I'm deeply uh I have great faith in our self-corrective ability and perhaps we don't even just
have level five leaders but this Young Generation coming up as a chief of staff of the army said
to me at a session at West Point this is the most inspired and inspiring generation to come through West Point
level five generation into positions of responsibility and power the better off I believe we will
cominging generation what I worry about for this wonderfully idealistic collaborative inspired
time this is not the normal mode of History 200 200 ad Rome 500 BCE Greece 2,000 BCE Egypt I we can go through a
few in history but it's not the norm the norm is usually instability and unbroken Prosperity is
not also the norm so they grew up in kind of an artificial time and so my next question is how do
I'd like you to picture uh s waking up at below Mount Everest at base camp and a big storm
comes blasting through the valley and you can hunker down in your tent and when the storm clears you can emerge and
Safety and Security the stability and prosperity base camp you wake up as a vulnerable little speck at
27,000 ft on the side of the mountain where the storms are bigger and faster everything more uncertain
everything more out of control there there you are not prepared there you are not psychologically prepared you are not
through might be more of a wakeup call that we're at 27,000 ft and we're very unlikely to be able to
go back to the nice safe stability of base camp we're up on the mountain and if in fact the last 30
years were the anomaly then we're going to be on that mountain now I'm confident Prosperity
will return it's what we know how to do I'm not at all confident that stability is going to
um this is where I think we are particularly exposed to the competitors from outside our outside the United
States when I meet with my friends from say Russia I had a group come to my laboratory from Russia they're in their
evaporated the tenants that they had grown up with gone the economy doesn't work the entire
social system overcome now they've had to learn how to operate in this other mode and what you realize when we were
talking about the economic crisis they said oh we don't worry that much about the economic crisis we have a different
Brazil who grew up with things like 30% a month inflation at times where you always make sure that you take a cab not
or my friends from Argentina who say in Argentina even the past is unpredictable here's my
thinking that has been enormously helpful to me that came from the good to Great research for dealing with great
was taught to us by when we were doing the good to Great research we trying to make sense of the CEOs when and in doing
that I just by chance happened to get to know Admiral Jim Stockdale who was the highest ranking military
officer in the Hanoi Hilton shot down in 1967 was there till 1974 they could pull him out at any time
book in Love and War which was written in alternating chapters by himself and his wife about their years when he was
seemed so difficult it seemed you know it it's like we can all endure anything if we know it's going to come to an end
end and you certainly don't know when so I asked Admiral Stockdale how he dealt with that and he said you have to
realize I never got depressed because I never ever wavered in my faith that not only I would get
out but I would turn being in the camp into the defining event of my life that in retrospect I would not
trade later when we were up the hill I asked him I said Admiral Stockdale who didn't make it out as strong as you and
he said easy it was the Optimus I said The Optimist you sounded optimistic he said no I was not
optimistic I never wavered in my faith that I would Prevail in the end but I was not optimistic I said what's the
difference oh the optimists always thought we'd be out by Christmas of course Christmas would come
Christmas would come again and they died of a broken heart and that's when Admiral Stockdale
grabbed me by the shoulders and said this is what I learned when you're facing in you're imprisoned by great
Calamity by great difficulty by great uncertainty you have to on the one hand never confuse the need for unwavering
discipline to confront the most brutal facts we actually face and we're not getting out of here by
Christmas as I speak to this wonderful upand cominging level five generation and I I is having a
conversation with a friend of mine who's going to be running for the US Senate and I asked him why he said nationally
as we encounter great challenge we must have the Stockdale Paradox and as you get hit by the things we might get hit
by never lose faith and to never deny those brutal facts that's the starting point for our
Peter I mentioned earlier the work built to last it it's very interesting we were studying enduring great companies in
contrast to others went back recently and realize we selected the study set for that study in 1989 two decades ago
them very successful companies today if you took a random sample of large publicly traded companies 20 years
ago what are the probabilities that all 18 in your random sample would be Standalone independent and largely
depression what do they teach us what has enabled them to have that what did we find that separated them and what
we found is that what really separated was not necessarily that they had smarter strategies although they often
did or that they were sort of more financially Savvy although they often were it was because they were founded
first and foremost and built always on a rock solid set of core values that are not open for negotiation
endure it wasn't strategic it was values and that is what this school teaches the great irony is people think
the second point is we have now done two decades of research studying those that do well in
contrast to those that do not across six different studies two in the social sectors four in business 7,000 years of
forth I would like to suggest maybe even assert as an empirical fact something that stands out and as we face this
difficult world that we're heading into not that we're leaving we're heading into the evidence is
great whether you build greatness out of Calamity or from scratch depends largely on what you do
fact lies largely maybe not entirely but predominantly in our own hands from our own disciplines and our
the idea of managing yourself but then scaling it up through organizations if you think about sort of
how people apply themselves when we go back and we look at the good to Great data and some of
the other data we find that that there's these three circles and you put your energies in the middle of three circles
and the first circle is what you're passionate about and what you love to do and what you stand for and the second
circle is what you can be the best at and the third circle is what drives your economic engine okay now and you focus
your energies there but let's drop that down a level to the individual how many of the folks under
myself okay I'd like you to think then about finding your own three circles at an individual level which is think about
passion that you love to do and that absolutely reflects your values and when you wake up in the morning there's this
sense of my goodness even if I getting paid for this I would want to do it even if I wasn't getting paid for
Circle which is finding what you're genetically encoded for and there's a big difference of what
you're good at and what you're genetically encoded for I discovered this as a young person
I went off to college I thought I would be a mathematician I had done well on math test but when I entered courses
math not being one of them I needed to find another version of my three circles and now imagine the third
circle as you're engaged in something that makes that is of of great value it's of either social or economic
imagine you have all three man I'm passionate about this I love to do it it expresses my values I'm genetically
5% maybe not even what would happen to the world if let's say it's 3% if we then made it
20% of people who are doing what they're passionate about genetically encoded for and are useful are in positions of real
contribution and value now I don't know the answer of how we make that percentage go up but
linking back to the idea of maslo how did he describe self-actualization it wasn't hanging out
do and committing to the ardor of pursuing it with Excellence the purpose of free Society I
yesterday and there's this bookshelf with all of Peter ducker's books and I asked a question Bob mentioned this last
intimidating as a last question and I don't need to spend a lot lot of time that as we look at people who are
getting older and older and we're we're young at 60 and 70 and 80 how do we reverse this tendency to
think that at 65 our work is behind us if we look at that bookshelf actually we should look at it is when we hit 65
most proud of he said I'm still working on it the next one now within that I will leave one
question for those who have moved and what Bob likes to think of as halftime I think there's a question that
does deserve an answer it might be one that I Channel some of my energies into for those who are thinking about
being useful after they've been successful I was at a group of gathering of philanthropists people who are
successful business people that have moved into philanthropy and I brought a question what systematically separates
successful business people who become great and effective philanthropists from successful business
question they thought it was simply good enough to become a philanthropist I would suggest it is
not and yet the interesting thing is we don't really know what separates with one thing that came out
people and give you 10 to-dos to consider those of you who are 40 years young 50 years young 60
years young you can also consider these but I specifically want to speak to our emerging level five generation and these
accomplishment but for their character the people you would be embarrassed to come to if you're
thinking is this really the right thing to do that you realize that even asking them would be
embarrassing I remember when the personal board idea occurred to me I was 25 years old I did not have a father who
I learned anything from except bad habits and I always resented the fact that my classmates in college could call
it and then I finally realized well if I didn't have a father I'll make one I'll create one so I started reading
biographies figure if I didn't get a dad I'll just invent one and as reading those biographies I
was driving down Alma Street in Palo Alto one day and I was listening to these interviews with the great
President Harry Truman done by Merl Miller and there's this wonderful line where Harry Truman says if you don't
know the difference between right and wrong by the time you're 30 you never will and I pulled off the side of the
road I'm panting I'm 25 years old I've Got 5 years to figure this out and hence was born the idea of the
it and he was not selected for that because in my mind he was the greatest management thinker
two please turn off your electronic Gadget not for others but for yourself effective people take time to
think begin the discipline of putting white space on your calendar where there's no phone no no email I was going
to say no facts but they don't even have that anymore uh no Twitter no emails no connections and engag in this glorious
pockets of quietude to think do you know that Rick Warden reads a book every single day a book a
circles and perhaps consider the idea of you studying yourself like a bug right and of making empirical observations to
say what does this bug do what is this bug passionate about and what is this bug encoded for and and with no judgment
don't judge and say this bug should be better at math non-judgmental empirical observation of
what you really are passionate about genetically encoded for and where you can be useful and get input from those
four what is your questions to statements ratio and can you double it John Gardner another member of my
personal board brought me into his office one day and said said it occurs to me Jim you spend way
too much of your time trying to be interesting why don't you Channel your time around being
interested that 10 seconds changed my life imagine going into every situation not with how to be interesting but how
to be interested how to ask questions how to learn from everybody you meet what is your questions to statements
ratio and can you double it and number five for those who have dealt with health this one also then really jumps
by if you woke up tomorrow morning and discovered that you had inherited $20 million and you also discovered you had
when we were talking last night Rick war and I and Peter Ducker had asked the same question always of him every time
he came not what have you done but what have you stopped doing because someone like rck War doesn't exactly have a
shortage of energy to do stuff and the real task is to always be clear about what to not do what to stop
reason if it doesn't fit your three circles remember there will always be many once in a lifetime
opportunities number eight how do we build that Legion of level five leaders find something for which you
nine great time of life to articulate the values that you will not compromise as a guiding constellation
remember this thing about the 18 and the 15 companies and what held them well the same applies at individual level if
we're going to go through whatever we're going to go through what's the guiding constellation it starts not first with
knew is that I didn't want to follow a traditional path I wanted to carve my own path and I was leaving the academic
world and I was really nervous about whether this could work and I'd met a good friend of mine who knew Peter duer
and he said said who do you admire I mentioned Peter he said well maybe Peter would like to talk with you I thought
Peter wouldn't want to talk with me why would he want to talk with me and then one day I get this message on my message
machine this is Peter Ducker call me and I call him and I'm calling from the Seattle Airport and I'm talking into the
phone because there's people around and I hear him yell through the phone speak up I'm not young anymore so I'm yelling
hand with two of his and he brings me across and he says Mr Collins I am so very pleased to
you and we sit as many in this room has sat with him in the wicker chair and you keep wanting to ask Peter Ducker
questions but you don't get a chance cuz he's asking you questions and I remember how his brain
work we went to lunch and he had a double espresso and a glass orer low preserve the core stimulate
progress and he gave me great Solace of realizing that you know he stumbled as well I remember to describing the great
frustration of writing and then having to write a whole chapter thinking it wasn't any good and throwing it in a
waste basket and he would looked at me and said that is immense progress I remember that every time now I throw a
whole chapter in the waist basket progress and he taught me the idea that day that entrepreneurship is not a
business idea it's a life idea right you can do a paint by numbers kit to life or you can try to paint a
day which was one of those I still have all the notes of course but he said something that has
come back to me over and over and over and over and over again he's turned me in that wonderfully
survival you'll probably survive and do you worry a lot at your age about how to be successful that's
to make good on this day and it's time why don't you really think about how to be useful
and that's the level five question I don't see myself I see it as a journey but that's the level five
two ways to change the world the sword meaning action and the pen and which is why this idea of having Osan
find one start one be like Wendy cop and employ the disciplines the disciplines of management which will amplify your
useful times a thousandfold and if there is any better way to honor the legacy of Peter Ducker
was but by going out and making ourselves useful and so I leave you with that please go out and make yourselves