Consulting Drucker

by William Cohen

  Instantly Discerning Certain Things that Others Missed

  At one time it was believed that chess players must all have highly-gifted memories, since the champions see several moves ahead of their less-gifted opponents. But recent research proves this to be inaccurate, because that’s not what champion chess players do at all. Nor are they more intelligent, necessarily, than you or me. What then is the big difference? The difference is that champion chess players can look at a given situation on a chessboard and instantly see possibilities, opportunities, threats, and what to do, while others cannot. This is because they can memorize entire chessboards with one quick look. Yet their memories of other things may be just as bad as everyone else’s.11 This ability is not something that they were born with, but rather a result of having experienced so much chess play that this incredible ability is automatic, and they need not even stop to think to be able to grasp a chess situation and apply this unique, but developed, talent.

  Drucker could do the same. Given a management situation, he usually could instantly capture the important facts and immediately ascertain the important issues and what questions to ask and whom to ask. Now, you may think that this ability is unique to Drucker and can be duplicated by few if any others. And that would be true as far as it goes, but the same question holds. It is a case of repetition over about 10 years, the exact number is not clear, but years of experience nevertheless. Maxwell Gladwell noted this in is his book Outliers. Simply speaking, you may see celebrities or others who seem to come out of nowhere become instantly successful. A little investigation shows this to be untrue. In every case, the “instant success” has a long history of experience to get where they are.

  Bobby Fischer, who some call the greatest chess grand master of all time, achieved this recognition at the ripe young age of 15. But most don’t stop to consider that he had been playing intensely for nine years! According to Gladwell, 10 years, or about 10,000 hours, is the norm. He calls this the “10,000 Hours Rule” and points out numerous examples to back up his statement.12 Does Drucker fit into this category? He started out as a journalist in about 1928. His first book, The End of Economic Man, was written about 10 years or 10,000 hours later.

  Modelling Drucker’s Thinking

  Each of us is an individual, and so each of us approach consulting and thinking differently from everyone else. However, this doesn’t mean that the basics can’t be used by anyone to attain similar results. We can observe and use our own brains to do analytical research to evolve our own theories, which we can generalize for consulting or anything else. And while looking at what we observe, we can:

  1. Examine ideas that appear intuitively obvious and find out whether they are true or not.

  2. Stand facts on their heads to see how they look if basic ideas are reversed.

  3. Keep at it with repetition for the 10,000 hours it takes until we too are able to instantly discern certain things that others miss in any situation in consulting, management, or the vocation of our desire. And maybe write like Drucker, too.

  1 No author listed, “Albert Einstein,” History, accessed at http://www.history.com/topics/albert-einstein, 11 July 2015.

  2 Albert Einstein, “Time, Space, Gravitation,” London Times, 28 November 1919 reprinted in Science, V. 2 ,2 January 1920, p.8, accessed at https://archive.org/details/science511920mich, 11 July 2015.

  3 No author listed, “What Is Analytical Research?” Ask, accessed at http://www.ask.com/business-finance/analytical-research-94534a536bf46028, 20 July 2015.

  4 Doyle, Arthur Conan, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, “The Blue Carbuncle” (Oak Park, IL: Top Five Books, iBooks, 2012), pps. 389-390.

  5 Ed Cooke, quoted in Foer, Joshua, Moonwalking with Einstein, (New York: Penguin Books, 2011). p.15.

  6 Drucker, Peter F., Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1973, 1974) p.60.

  7 No author listed, “Ex-NFL star Tillman Makes ‘Ultimate Sacrifice’,” NBC.COM, 26 April 2004, accessed at http://www.nbcnews.com/id/4815441/ns/world_news/t/ex-nfl-star-tillman-makes-ultimate-sacrifice/, 27 November 2015.

  8 No author listed, “Pat Tillman,” Wikipedia, accessed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Tillman November 27 2015.

  9 Op cit Drucker, Peter F., Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practises.

  10 No author listed, “Argumentum Ad Populum,” The Free Dictionary by Farlex, accessed at http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Argumentum+ad+populum, 15 July 2015.

  11 JoshuaFoer, Moonwalking with Einstein (New York: Penguin Books, 2011) p. 65.

  12 Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers (New York: Little Brown and Company, 2008) p. 41.

  Chapter 12

  Developing a Client’s Self-confidence and Your Own, Too

  Drucker wrote that no manager can operate effectively without taking risks. We’ve already discussed Drucker’s advice on taking risks in chapter 10. However, until now we have ignored the fact that taking professional risks demands self-confidence. He also wrote that fear of job loss was inconsistent with a manager’s ability to perform at a high level. The exact quote from one of his books is: “Living in fear of loss of job and income is incompatible with taking responsibility for job and work group, for output and performance.”1 But how can you not fear job loss, especially in times when loss of a job is a real possibility, regardless of tenure or prior highly successful performance? Maybe the whole company goes under. In that case, you are going to lose your job. Both of these issues and many others as well are solved by self-confidence.

  The Answer Is Self-confidence

  The answer to this and other questions is self-confidence. I’ve never seen a highly successful manager without a good deal of self-confidence, and I challenge you to find any “up and comer”, “fast burner”,—or whatever you want to call managers who seem to zoom right up the corporate ladder and past their contemporaries—who don’t possess a healthy dose of self-confidence as well. Self-confidence is a necessity for significant success for us and for our clients. Unfortunately, the fact that it is a necessity doesn’t in itself tell us how to acquire this important trait.

  Sure, most who have already achieved great success usually have self-confidence. Unfortunately, those who are not in this category – and that’s most of us as we progress in our careers – sometimes feel self-confident, but many times we do not. We are concerned with possibly losing our jobs in tough times, and we may sometimes choose the safest path when the way to enormous success involves more risk than we’re willing to tolerate. We know what Drucker recommended to us, and we may agree with his recommendations. We know that if we were achieving the success of that small percentage of our colleagues that are shooting ahead at light speed, we would have the self-confidence that Drucker wrote about. However, to reach that kind of success, we first need to acquire self-confidence. We can’t achieve great things without self-confidence, but we can’t have the self-confidence without achieving them first. Or so it would seem.

  Drucker’s Secrets

  You must acquire self-confidence yourself before you can instil it in others. Yet in my research into Drucker, I found there to be only three ways to gain self-confidence:

  1. Being born with it.

  2. Gain it slowly and laboriously over many years as you acquire experience, make mistakes, learn from them, and gain success.

  3. Start building your self-confidence yourself, purposely, whenever you decide to.

  Born with Self-confidence

  Now there’s a stunt if you could pull it off. However, unless you are into some kind of spiritual technology, that’s just not possible. Or leaving room for the belief that nothing is impossible, it is not practical, and I don’t think we can turn to Drucker for help if we want to do a rewind and begin our lives anew from the start. However, the truth is, no one is really born with self-confidence.

  No one starts right out in life accomplishing what we think of as big things. We start as an infant and accomp
lish what we today think of as small things, like learning to walk and talk. But are these really small things? At the time you first learned to do any of these routine human accomplishments, if you had been able to think about it at all, you probably would not have thought that they were so small. The truth is, even with these “small things”, we started out by doing still smaller things first and slowly increasing the difficulty of the subtasks until we could accomplish such a major task such as learning to walk for the first time.

  Today, there is no longer any doubt that, unless you have a major injury, when you stand, put forth one leg and then another, you are going to move forward and walk. As you read these sentences, unless you are just learning the language, there is little doubt that you will understand what you have read. You automatically expect positive results.

  With the more complex and challenging tasks and projects of adults and managers, you may fail to expect to succeed for only one of two reasons. Either you have been unsuccessful at similar tasks or projects in the past, or you have never tried to accomplish them in the first place. And by the way, people who believe that they would be unsuccessful at a particular task frequently never try it because of the belief that they would fail if they did.

  You Learn to Crawl Before You Can Walk

  How many infants have you heard of who simply took their bottles out of their mouths, placed them on a nearby table, hopped out of their cribs, and began to walk? I don’t know about you, but I haven’t heard of any. The correct sequence is that the baby learns to roll over, begins to crawl, gains self-confidence enough to stand up, gains a little more self-confidence, and takes a step. Usually the first step ends in a minor disaster and the infant falls. But the baby knows that at least a start has been made. Usually the parents are so elated by the attempt that they are full of praise and cheer enthusiastically, even though the baby may have not managed to take even a single step successfully. So the failed attempt is forgotten or is not thought about as a failure, but as a successful first attempt, and the child eagerly tries again not long afterward.

  This illustrates an interesting fact about why people in general, and many consultants and executives, lack self-confidence later on in life. An infant learning a more mature task usually has someone cheering him on. But even if he didn’t, who’s to say that when he fell taking his first step, it was a terrible or a good attempt? The problem is that as we get older, there are others that observe us, either with or without malice. Moreover, many of these observers are judgemental and never fail to let us know when we do a poor job, less so when we do an acceptable one or even a pretty good one. So we get the idea that it is never a good attempt. In fact, an attempt is always a good attempt. It took my youngest son, now a successful management consultant, almost two years to learn to talk. I wasn’t worried. It took Einstein almost four years!

  A child wants to help wash the dishes and drops and breaks a plate in the process. Maybe the mother is nervous and irritable. So she yells at the child, who was eagerly and enthusiastically trying to help. Is the child as ready to rush forward to help with the dishes or other tasks in the future? Maybe, but not very likely. Worse, what if the mother is particularly upset because the plate was a prized possession? In addition to yelling, she tells the child that he or she is clumsy. If the mother continues to refer to the child as clumsy, eventually the child may even accept this statement as the truth. The growing child may internalize this “fact” and could have serious consequences later in having the self-confidence to accomplish other things. As the child gets older and leaves home, others may reinforce this erroneous belief. Children, in particular, are very critical of other children’s failures. Some teachers can be even worse. Fortunately some don’t listen.

  Michael Jordan, who some call the greatest basketball player of all time, didn’t make his high school basketball team and at five eleven was told he was too short to play varsity. He grew four inches one summer, but equally importantly, he trained vigorously, and by graduation he was selected for McDonald’s All American Team and recruited by numerous colleges.2

  A Closer Look at Those Who Were Born with Self-confidence

  Individuals who are “born” with self-confidence usually developed it in their formative years and before they enter their professional lives. Mary Kay Ash, the woman who built a billion dollar corporation, Mary Kay Cosmetics, and gave away pink Cadillacs to her most successful saleswomen, didn’t even go to college. Yet she had the self-confidence to begin her business with $5,000 only weeks after her planned support, her husband, died suddenly of a massive heart attack. Born with self-confidence? No, but as a little girl of seven she had more responsibility than many adults; she cared for her bedridden father daily so her mother could work. This included many ancillary chores and all the shopping for her family. Do you think that may have helped her in developing self-confidence as she grew older, before she even started her professional career?

  Steven Spielberg is a fabulous moviemaker, director, producer, and screenwriter. He’s worth over $3 billion. He was beaten up and received a bloody nose on two occasions by school bullies because he is Jewish. But Spielberg made his first film for a Boy Scout merit badge in photography at the age of 12. With the confidence gained from his first film, he went on and made a 40-minute war film and won first place in a film contest a year later. Then, three years later he wrote and directed a full-length science fiction film. It was shown at a local theatre and actually generated a profit … of one dollar. He gained more confidence and made more films on his own, getting better and better. He applied to the famous School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California, but they turned him down.

  However, Spielberg had the self-confidence not to let that bother him. He attended California State University, Long Beach instead, and talked himself into a “part-time” job working seven days a week as an unpaid intern at Universal Studios. You know what he probably did next, and he did it. He made a short film on the Universal Studios’ lot and had the self-confidence to get it to Sidney Sheinberg, then vice president of production for Universal’s TV division, to view it. Sheinberg immediately signed Spielberg up as a TV director, although he was still not a college graduate and most TV directors had worked their way up after long years of experience, and possibly had also attended a famous school of cinematics. Spielberg was by then a very experienced and confident 23-year-old. He went on to become one of the top directors in Hollywood and made such films as Jaws, the Indiana Jones films, the Jurassic Park Films, The Color Purple, Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan, ET, Lincoln, and many, many others.3

  Okay, that’s great. If you developed self-confidence before you began your work career, you have it already and others think you were born with it. What about the 99% of us that didn’t do this?

  Gain Self-confidence Slowly as You “Pay Your Dues”

  Some of us eventually become successful this way and there is nothing wrong with doing this, except that it is usually a long and sometimes painful process. Basically, you enter work or a profession and do what everyone else is doing—work hard and do your best. Hopefully you stand out and your efforts are eventually noted and rewarded. If all goes well and as you progress upward, you gain more self-confidence at every stage. Of course there may be bumps along the way. Sometimes a promotion you think you earned goes to someone else. Through no fault of your own, you could suffer a layoff. Bad things seem to occur at inopportune times, such as soon after having purchased an expensive house, or if you are supporting a child in college, and if you are laid off it could be more difficult to find another job, particularly as you get older. However, if you persevere and are a little lucky, you will probably eventually reach your goals if they are not too high. However, the process is uncertain, takes time, and comes with no guarantees that you will get to where you want to go, even eventually.

  Take Charge of Your Own Confidence-building

  I like this method best. It is faster and has less risk than
the previous method. Moreover, it gives you more control. The method of taking charge that I recommend is based on a simple principle. You can develop anything about yourself – physical, mental, or spiritual – by beginning with a small challenge and increasing it over time. In this way it is related to the slow, “pay your dues” method discussed previously, except that it is much faster, less risky, and guarantees results since you are not dependent on someone else, only yourself. Drucker noted that: “Every artist throughout history has practised kaizen, or organized, continuous self-improvement.”4 And, “You will be a top producer if you put yourself where your strengths are and if you work on developing your strengths.”5 For example, exercise a muscle every day, and every day that muscle is going to grow bigger and stronger.

  Arnold Schwarzenegger didn’t start out with all the muscles that led him to win international bodybuilding championships before he became an actor or governor of California. However, by exercising with increasingly heavy weights every day, his muscles got bigger until after some years he was at world-championship level. This didn’t start with Arnold. Milo, an ancient Greek athlete, trained by lifting a calf every day and carrying it a short distance. Four years later he was still lifting the calf, but he gained immortal fame throughout the ancient world because the “calf” was now a fully matured bull. I don’t think anyone before or since has pulled off that stunt.