Here’s what management guru Peter Drucker might ask SA’s current crop of leaders

Whatever your personal opinion is of President Jacob Zuma, one thing is for sure: being president is a tough job. We have many expectations of our top leader, and the position comes with a great deal of responsibility. That’s why generations of leaders have turned to management gurus like Peter Drucker to help them cope with their roles. Managing people and leading teams is hard work, and models of leadership that such gurus provide can help people grow into their positions and fulfill expectations. In this piece, we engage in a thought experiment, trying to imagine what management guru Peter Drucker might say if he could talk to SA’s current leaders. – FD

By Ted Black*

One of the most highly regarded business conferences in the world was held quite recently, not in Davos, but Vienna. It was the sixth annual Global Peter Drucker Forum, which now meets every November.

Drucker, born 1909 in Vienna, died in 2005. He was “the man who invented management” as Business Week once put it. Today, he is most likely unknown and unread by most managers aged under forty and maybe many older than that. All today’s management gurus owe him plenty though.

During his early years in Europe, the extremist views and political dogma of left and right wing thinkers dismayed him. Their beliefs flourished in Germany and Russia during the 1920s and ’30s and before moving to the USA, he saw firsthand some of the horrific results of the fanaticism and managerial incompetence they spawned.

“The three most charismatic leaders in this century,” he once said, “inflicted more suffering on the human race than almost any trio in history: Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. What matters is not the leader’s charisma. What matters is the leader’s mission.”

Because of his experiences and study of effective executives, his books promote common sense, simplicity and ethical behaviour – doing the right things right.

Given the gloom and doom views of South Africa today held by more and more disheartened people here and elsewhere, if he were still alive and invited to give his wise counsel, what might he ask or say to the powers that be in government and big business?

Starting with purpose, or mission, something he always stressed, his first question might be, “Do you still want to be seen as the Rainbow Nation…peaceful, prosperous…one of the most respected in the world…certainly #1 in Africa…are all of you still serious about that?”

If yes, though many may wonder, a first follow up question could be, “Then, what are the right things you have to do? To which opportunities should government and business be allocating resources and efforts that will yield major economic results…the contributions that make you effective and gain you performance power?”

Drucker found that effective executives contribute by concentrating and focusing on opportunities and building on strengths. Most of us do the opposite. We spend our time, effort and money burning up lots of energy on matters where superb performance has little or no impact on results. We become ineffective. Why?

He said it’s because we confuse effectiveness with efficiency. We muddle doing the right things with doing things right. There is nothing as useless as doing superbly what we shouldn’t do at all. It’s even worse than doing them badly, which seems to happen much of the time.

The information tools we use mostly focus on being efficient, not effective. They rarely point the way to improvement. The root problem is that most of us ignore a well-known but rarely used principle: 10% to 20% at most of all events account for 90% of all results we get.

The “normal distribution” curve in nature does not apply. In business, a few hundred customers out of thousands generate most of the sales revenue; a few products out of many hundreds produce most of the sales; very few salesmen out of many book most of the orders. In a plant, a few production runs make up most of the output. With people issues, sickness, accidents, absenteeism, grievances all tend to come from a few places or groups.

The importance of this principle seems understood by very few executives in either government or business. It means first that if 10% of events generate 90% of results, then 90% of the costs are being driven by 90% of the events that produce few or no results at all.

Second, it means that economic results are in direct proportion to sales and that costs are in direct proportion to the number of activities that take place from paying to being paid. Most of those are “waste”. They add no value and no customer would want to pay for them.

That’s what the principle means for a business. What does it mean for South Africa (Pty) Ltd?

To create a Rainbow nation means giving all its people the opportunity to contribute in a healthy, thriving society. Like a business, whose purpose is to create customers, to achieve that means making resources productive – human and physical ones.

A nation is like a business. The task and reason for a business’s existence is an economic one. A corporate office’s task is to be a “water carrier” for the operating managers on the front line…to help them create customers, make money and generate cash. A government’s task is to do superbly well the very few things that help its people become productive and able to contribute.

If organised business is the entrepreneurial centre of today’s economy and society, isn’t it executives who now make the important economic decisions? Governments, like corporate offices, measure but don’t manage even though they act as if they do. They don’t make resources productive. Only operating managers do.

If the vision is a “Rainbow nation”, what’s the mission? Wealth distribution or wealth creation?

Is your aim to make the poor wealthy or productive? Do you want to build a new generation of effective managers or to tick bureaucratic checklists?

Do you want to build on your strengths and make it easy for the world to do business with you or not?

What’s the mission and what are the few, critical tasks that have to be done, not just planned?

* Ted Black runs workshops and coaches and mentors using the ROAM model to pinpoint opportunities for measurable, bottom-line, team-driven projects. He is also a freelance writer. His website is www.managementclinic.co.za