Drucker’s most powerful ideas have been assembled in one place – The Daily Drucker. Culled from his lifetime of writings, The Daily Drucker presents the keys to his thinking and pulls together his remarkable body of work. Each of the 366 insights in the book are accompanied with a call to action. Each week from now I shall be compiling my notes from The Daily Drucker under a series of blog posts titled The Weekly Drucker Classroom.

Integrity in Leadership

The spirit of an organization is created from the top. When you appoint someone to a senior position it implies that you are willing to have his or her character serve as the model for subordinates. Hence, it is imperative to appoint people with intergrity.

Scribble:
Conversely, when you are considering a job offer, evaluate the character of the CEO and top management of the organization. Align your self with people who possess intergrity.

Identifying the Future

The important thing is to identify the “future that has already happened” i.e. identify the trends in your market that have already appeared, think of their longevity and impact on your life and organization.

Scribble:
Some of the trends that I could identify in the online recruitment space:
i. Recruiting via social and professional networks, blogs, microblogs – Social recruiting
ii. Personal branding on the Internet / Online reputation – Google resume
iii. Employer branding through social media

Management is Indespensable

Whoever makes two blades of grass grow where only one grew before deserves better of mankind than any speculative philosopher or metaphysical system builder.

Scribble:
Keep this in mind when up against an armchair critic.

Organizational Inertia

All organizations need a discipline that makes them face up to reality. Businesses are subject to the discipline of the market and hence forced to change with times. But governments, hospitals and non-profit organizations do not face market pressures and lose discipline.

Scribble:
If you ever do start a non-profit initiative, it should be subject to some kind of yardstick and performance metric.

5. Abandonment

There is nothing as difficult and as expensive, but also nothing as futile, as trying to keep a corpse from stinking.

Stop squandering your resources on obsolete businesses and free up your capable people to take advantage of new opportunities.

Scribble:
If your business is failing to take off, the right thing to do is to shut down and move on to something else. I think 1000 days is a good time to take this call.

Practice of abandonment

Abandon is the right action when:
i. A product, service, market, or process “still has a few years of life.”
ii. The only reason for keeping it is that “It is fully written off.”
iii. When a new and growing product, service, or process is being neglected for the sake of maintaining an old or declining product, service, market, or process.

Scribble:
Keep your ears open to these three lines of argument. I’ve heard these before and each time the management decided not to abandon the business.

Knowledge Workers: Asset Not Cost

Attract and retain the highest producing knowledge workers by treating them and their knowledge as the most valuable assets of the organization.

Scribble:
Knowledge workers are more like artists and each one should be recognized for their individual knowledge. They hate being seen as a number.