Nov 26 2005
Current Leadership-Thoughts Blog: Peter Drucker–A Man’s Spiritual Journey From Kierkegaard to General Motors: November 19, 2005
Peter Drucker died on November 11, 2005. This NYT article is a tribute to this incredible man who changed the face of organizational leadership and management. In fact, one of THE BEST books I have ever read on leadership and management was Drucker’s Managing the Non-Profit: Principals and Practices.
You can’t help but read anything Drucker has written and not get a sense that he was a man with spiritual convictions…the kind of convictions that underlie his principals of leadership and management. Though his spiritual moorings were always understated and stealthily articulated, they were present in the way he described the impact managers/leaders have upon people and organizations. The following are excerpts from the NYTs article by Peter Steinfels:
Religion, it turned out, had a great deal to do with Mr. Drucker’s work. In 1989, the editors of Leadership, an evangelical quarterly for pastors, asked him, “After a lifetime of studying management, why are you now turning your attention to the church?”
Mr. Drucker politely corrected them. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s the other way around,” he said. “I became interested in management because of my interest in religion and institutions.”
Then, at age 19, Mr. Drucker came across the works of the theologian and philosopher Soren Kierkegaard - and was bowled over. He studied Danish in order to read Kierkegaard’s yet-untranslated writings.
From Kierkegaard to studying General Motors and the secrets of entrepreneurship may seem like a long stretch. But Kierkegaard’s stark Christian vision spoke to Mr. Drucker’s lifelong search for what he was observing while working in a Germany sliding into Nazism - an explanation of why, in a modern world of organizations and rapid change, freedom has so often been surrendered.
Mr. Beatty notes the “nakedly religious sentiment” with which Mr. Drucker ended his 1959 book “Landmarks of Tomorrow.”
“The individual,” Mr. Drucker wrote, “needs the return to spiritual values, for he can survive in the present human situation only by reaffirming that man is not just a biological and psychological being but also a spiritual being, that is creature, and existing for the purposes of his creator and subject to Him.”
As Mr. Stafford observed, “Drucker hardly ever uses theological or biblical terminology to express himself, even if he is writing about something that easily fits theological categories. With some other management writer this might be an accident, but Drucker is so well educated in philosophy and theology that it has to be a conscious choice. The point is that Drucker is not a man of pious gestures.”
So if Mr. Drucker’s religious interests were not more widely noticed, it was due to his own reticence as much as to any antipathy to religion in the world of business or ideas. Still, once one becomes aware of his religions as well as his political outlook, it is not hard to see them as underpinnings for much of his thinking about the human obligations of management and the importance of community in an unstable world.
His reticence disappeared, of course, when he was addressing religion and management directly. He tossed out ideas and opinions in his usual dizzying fashion, comparing Reformation-era Calvinists and Jesuits, declaring revolutions “in the human spirit,” obviously less concerned about being wrong than about not provoking thought.
Sermons are important. “You have 20 minutes to communicate the vision,” he said, the fact “that there is another world, but it completely penetrates, encompasses, encapsulates this world.”
Sometimes he criticized churches as being unconcerned about the world. At other times, he criticized them as emphasizing social programs to the neglect of a distinctly spiritual mission.
“The church is the only organization that is not entirely concerned with the kingdom of this earth,” he said. “We’re the only one with another dimension. And for that reason, many good concerns around here are not our primary focus.”
“Making a difference in the way people see what’s truly important in life” was his ultimate test for both individuals and churches.
“I don’t know,” he acknowledged, “that you can measure this - certainly not by the bookkeeping of this world - but I’m reasonably sure that some sort of bookkeeping is going on someplace.”
In this world, he said in a characteristic marriage of the visionary and the practical, the ones who best understand what can make a difference are the saints.
“That’s the definition of a saint,” Mr. Drucker said, “somebody who sees reality.”
The point I would like to make about Drucker’s words coupled with my own convictions is that the exercise of leadership and management principals and practices, regardless of the arguments anyone postulates to the contrary, become “best practices” when they are undergirded, buttressed and permeated with a spirituality and theology that values people, the potentially redemptive good in every organization and the larger flow of human history toward an inexorable good and firm hope!