2. You don’t need to build a giant consulting organization to do a lot of good, gain a lot of fame, and make a lot of money as an independent consultant. Drucker answered his own phone, even at the height of his fame. There is no reason why we can’t do the same or similar things “they” tell us not to do.
3. Honesty is not just the best policy, it is the only policy if you want long-term success, and that’s something you can’t let slip. How often do we see really big names in every field who let their integrity slip and that’s the end? So even though it may be a disadvantage in the short run, you must maintain your integrity at all costs.
4. Obstacles will always appear. The first thing that happened to an acquaintance of mine when he started his own consulting practice was that he got sued. It took him three years to win the case. Consider how you would best deal with such problems while struggling to get clients? Drucker had to shelve his goal of becoming a professor teaching graduate courses at a major university for about 15 years because of “a little thing” like Hitler coming to power in Germany. So he did what he needed to do and eventually he not only reached his initial goal, but accomplished a lot more.
5. Don’t depend on others for education in your profession or as a consultant. Some corporate managers maintain that their companies will pay for advanced education, or send them to the right courses or seminars if they really need them. Don’t bet on it. Drucker didn’t even depend on his parents, who wanted him to go to college. He took an apprenticeship and spent lots of time reading and educating himself, even while he struggled balancing law school and working full time. Drucker was not superhuman. He just calculated what he was going to have to do under the circumstances of prewar Germany and Austria, and later post-war US and did it. He didn’t wait for either parental help or a corporate or government hand-out.
6. Writing a bestselling book doesn’t guarantee your success. But it sure can’t hurt, and if your timing is correct or lucky, it can take you right to the top. Moreover, just about anyone can write, or can learn to do so if they are willing to make the effort. Drucker didn’t even know English perfectly when he started.
7. Sure, serendipity helps, but consider serendipity as a process. Do enough things (maybe even read enough books like Walpole or Drucker) and positive serendipitous happenings are sure to come your way.
8. Drucker’s mentor, Marvin Bower, cautioned not to discuss your client’s work. Drucker may have stumbled on this one. As a result, he lost the good will of a major corporate icon, Alfred P. Sloan. Of course, Drucker didn’t know that he had written anything to offend, but this is not the issue. It is in the eyes of the offended that counts. Drucker should have been more careful. He might have even received Sloan’s blessing had he approached him, and he apparently had access. However, Drucker learned his lesson and you would be hard-pressed to find a client’s business publicized in the manner of GM by Drucker from that time on.
9. The client is the real expert. An argument can be made that Drucker didn’t tell clients what to do so much as guide them to tell themselves. Perhaps he took away a little of the glamour with asking more questions than providing answers and PowerPoint presentations. Drucker’s model of the management consultant wasn’t the image of the man on the white horse riding up, telling people what to do, making things right, and riding off as someone asked, “who was that masked man?” as rapid hoof beats sounded in the background with the words: “Hi ho, Silver.”
10. Although Drucker gave us much through his values, principles, and genius, I believe that Drucker’s most valuable contribution was that he taught us how to think. Then he expected us to do it followed by action.
I can only end this book the way Drucker would have ended it: don’t tell me how much you enjoyed my words – tell me what you are going to do differently on Monday morning.
Bill Cohen
Pasadena, California
February 2016
Appendix
Essays on Drucker’s Consulting by Clients and Experts
How Peter Drucker’s Consulting and Philosophy Worked for Me
By Frances Hesselbein
Long ago, in 1976, I came to New York from the mountains of Johnstown in western Pennsylvania, a big-steel, big-coal, big-hearts community, to be the new CEO of the Girl Scouts of the USA, the largest organization for girls and women in the world.
I carried with me every Peter F. Drucker book and film I owned – and I owned them all. In my two previous CEO positions, our leadership and management decisions were pure Peter. We found the Drucker philosophy and resources exactly right for us.
We had thrown out the old hierarchy – the up-down, top-bottom, superior-subordinate language – and had launched our own Girl Scout management system, where we moved our people across the organization. We called it circular management.
It worked, and became the exciting structure for over three million girls and women. Our belief: “Only the best is good enough for those who serve girls.”
In 1990, after 13 incredible years as CEO of the Girl Scouts of the USA, following an exuberant final year I left the best people and the best organization in the world. I was ready to write a book and not travel so much, but six weeks after I left, I found myself the president and CEO of the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Non-profit Management.
I thought I was to be the chairman, but Peter said firmly, “You will be the president and CEO or it won’t work.”
So six weeks after leading the largest organization for girls and women in the world, I found myself the president and CEO of the smallest foundation, with no money, no staff, just a small board sharing a love for Peter Drucker and a commitment to keep Peter and his philosophy moving across the country and around the world.
For the first several years, Peter travelled from Claremont to New York for our board meetings. He spoke at every conference. When the time came for us to travel to California, it was joyous to be with Peter.
While Peter left us in 2005 and we now have a new name, The Frances Hesselbein Leadership Institute, we are still the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Non-profit Management. We carry in our hearts and minds Peter’s popular phrases: “Think first, speak last” and “Ask, don’t tell.” We quote Peter everywhere it is appropriate. He still inspires us to this day and always will.
About Frances Hesselbein
Frances Hesselbein is President and CEO of the Frances Hesselbein Leadership Institute, founded as the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Non-profit Management and is its founding president. Prior to this, Hesselbein served as the CEO for the Girl Scouts of the USA. Hesselbein was the first CEO to rise from being an unpaid troop leader to the top job in 67 years. She led a turnaround, increasing minority membership and attaining a membership of 2.25 million girls with a workforce of 780,000, mainly volunteers. Peter Drucker wrote that Hesselbein could be the successful CEO of any US corporation. She held the first chair of leadership at West Point and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Bush in 1998. Hesselbein is a trustee of the California Institute of Advanced Management.
Becoming a “Master Questioner” Like Drucker
By Penny (Ping) Li
In 2013, I was one of the first MBA graduates from the California Institute of Advanced Management (CIAM), and I also became one of its first directors. In learning to consult using Drucker’s methods, I completed 11 consulting engagements. What I learned and applied most was that Drucker became such a successful consultant by the very simple secret of asking the right questions.
When I first heard about Drucker’s methodology of questioning, I didn’t think that I had much to learn. I was a TV journalist in China for eight years. My daily work was all about asking questions. In my job I interviewed people every day with the goal of giving my television audience a better understanding of what people were doing in our city. These were what you call “human interest” pieces in the US.
One day I met Rui Wang, a little six-year old Chinese boy with cerebral
palsy. I had never interviewed anyone that young. He watched his twin brother leave home for school every morning, but Rui had to stay at home, as the cerebral palsy made him immobile. Rui exercised very hard every day under his grandpa’s guidance. Rui’s grandfather was raising him, as both of Rui’s parents deserted him after being told that he would never recover from his disease.
Rui was covered with sweat from his exertions in trying to walk. I asked him my first question right away: “Rui, you must be tired from practising walking every day, right?”
“No,” he answered bravely, “I’m not tired at all.”
But I could see that this little boy was totally exhausted. I persisted: “Rui, you are very brave, but I don’t believe you. I can see with my own eyes that you are sweating. Are you telling me the whole truth?”
“Yes, Um … no … sort of. I hurt a little.”
“Why don’t you stop for a few moments and rest?” “Because if I don’t work hard, I’ll not recover, then I’ll be a burden to my grandpa, my brother, and to the country!”
I knew what to do and kept “digging” deeper. I also thought that while we were talking, Rui was resting, even if he did not realize it. So I expanded my interview as long as I could. Finally, I could not stretch the interview longer. My last question was, “Rui, do you have a dream?”
I could see he was excited when he answered me. “Yes, I do have a dream! I have a dream that one day I will go to school with my brother and sit next to him and learn in a real classroom.” I swallowed with difficulty and bid Rui goodbye.
In my documentary I showed my audience a brave little boy who was not only very intelligent, but very thoughtful. His pure and innocent heart was full of hope while his mind constantly focused on his dream. My documentary was so well received that many donors called our hotline in tears to make a donation for Rui. They wanted badly to help him achieve his dream. As a result, Rui received so many contributions that he was able to begin medical treatment and therapy. I was privileged to one day see him accepted as a student by a school and attend classes with his brother.
So when I met with my very first consulting client in the MBA programme at CIAM, I thought that I already had a special ability of asking questions, maybe even better than Drucker! All I needed to do was to ask his famous five questions and that was it!
The client was an owner of a bus charter company in Los Angeles and wanted to expand his business into a full-fledged tourism company. He thought that since he already had the buses, he just needed to bring in tourists worldwide. I remembered that we had learned the five famous questions that Drucker asked clients, including asking about the mission, customers, and plan. I began asking my questions one by one. Below are the answers he gave me:
Q: What is your mission?
A: To be more profitable
Q: Who is your customer?
A: Everyone!
Q: What does your customer value?
A: Oh, we have the lowest price
Q: What results do you seek?
A: Tell me how I can attract customers worldwide, especially from China and India, as both countries are my targets now (this answer makes more sense compared with other four answers)
Q: What is your plan?
A: My plan? I need you to provide me with a business plan and tell me what exactly I should do! I’ll follow your recommendations!
Obviously, the first meeting with my client was quite short, and I felt anxious afterward as I realized that thinking I was a master consultant-questioner like Drucker was just plain wrong. I had no idea how to get the client to reveal the information that I needed in order to help him! I realized that asking questions of my interviewees for TV stories and asking questions of my consulting clients regarding their businesses were entirely different.
Peter Drucker once said that the consultant is not able to understand a business as well as the client does. The consultant will not be the one who provides answers to the client’s issues or problems; instead, the correct consulting process is based on asking the right questions to make the client think about the problems from different angles and be able to figure out what to do on his or her own.
I got a copy of a consulting report that Drucker had done for Coca-Cola in the 1990s. It is called, “Challenges Facing the Coca-Cola Company in the Nineteen-Nineties”. Drucker made it clear in its introduction that, “This report raises questions. It does not attempt to give answers.” Instead of telling the client what was wrong or what they should do, Drucker asked many questions in the report, a lot more than his famous five. However, I observed that the questions he asked the client were actually leading questions, such as: “What is it that should be promoted?” “What alternatives are there?” and many more.
Since Drucker said that clients knew their organizations much better than the consultants, the clients may have been thinking about what actions might be wrong, and what actions would probably be right to correct the problems. But the consultant wasn’t the one with the real knowledge – the client was. Therefore, the consultant’s job was to help the client eliminate wrong ideas or actions, and get him to become aware of the right actions to take.
With Drucker’s principles and methodology in mind, we were able to ask better questions based on our marketing research. For example, when we asked the first question, “who is your customer?” we came up with more questions regarding the analysis of demographics (age, education, ethnicity, occupation) and lifestyle (income, housing ownership, consumer behaviour). We guided the client to think with us about who should not be his customer or what group of people he would not be able to consider as a target market. Within seven weeks, we provided our client with an in-depth consulting report on how to attract Asian tourists and received very positive feedback from him. He told us that he was much clearer about the mission and in this instance why he should concentrate on providing high quality service instead of continuing to lower the prices, which was the way he had looked at his problems earlier. As Drucker said, it was not the right answers that we needed to focus on, but the right questions.
After the completion of 11 consulting projects with my classmates at CIAM for various companies, I learned that we, the consultants, are not the ones to provide answers. Our function is to ask the right questions, wisely, learning about the organization with the clients, in order to help them challenge some assumptions and reframe the original issues and problems. By being asked the right questions, the clients were not only be able to figure out a better solution on their own, but also learn how to see the same problems from multiple angles to arrive at optimal solutions.
I think now that while my questioning of Rui performed a real service to be proud of, the techniques I used were wrong for eliciting the right questions for my consulting. They worked for Rui because he had already learned the correct questions and answered them. All I had done was to show an audience what he had done. And in a sense, I have repeated that in this essay. All I have done is to show you Drucker’s questions and his answers and helped show you what he has done.
About Penny (Ping) Li
Penny Li is Director of Admissions at the California Institute of Advanced Management. She was one of CIAM’s first MBA graduates and completed 11 consulting engagements as a student using Drucker’s methods, receiving written and video testimonials from several consulting clients. She developed a major project for a United Nations’ competition that recommended applications of Drucker’s consulting procedures. During the production of a televised charity event, she organized a media aid project fundraiser that raised $150,000 for 6,000 children with cerebral palsy. A video that she directed on student consulting, based on Drucker’s consulting principles, was selected as a finalist in the sixth annual Drucker Forum held in Vienna, Austria.
The Drucker Consulting Experience
By Eric McLaughlin
I was one of those fortunate individuals to have the privilege of attending Claremont Graduate University with multiple class
es from Peter Drucker, qualifying exams for my doctorate, and a letter of recommendation for my first teaching position. My consulting company focuses on the health care industry and my experience with other consultants has jaded my perceptions considerably. The scene I have witnessed numerous times is a salesperson making a pitch to management with the emphasis on how the “product” can achieve remarkable results. The consulting report produced invariably consists of a canned format with the client’s name and logo prominently displayed on numerous pages and the report contains an abundance of tables, graphs, charts, and recommendations that would apply to any organization, as the data is completely generic. Thousands (and sometimes hundreds of thousands) of dollars would be charged for this “customized” product.
Peter Drucker’s approach to consulting was diametrically opposite to that of the pre-packaged, written recommendations of the major consulting companies. Instead of “telling” the client what they needed to do, Peter focused on change: rethinking the organization’s raison d’être. Much like Socrates centuries ago, Peter would simply ask questions and listen very carefully to the responses. His philosophy to consulting was to not presume anything nor to have a product “on the shelf ”, ready to package – he just listened and probed with additional questions.
He once told our class the story of his consulting opportunity with the management team of one of the largest railway companies in the United States. When he asked the question, “What does this company do?” he received the quick response, “We move materials efficiently and cost effectively.” Peter replied, “While that is the process of your actions within this business, it is not your real business.” The management team was shocked and without retort. Peter continued with the information he had gained about this client prior to the meeting and was ultimately able to communicate to the managers that their company was the largest single landholder in the United States (acquired via purchases and eminent domain). It was the use of this land that allowed them to build the rail system upon which the locomotives and freight trains operated.
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