Rick Wartzman: All Publications, Events and Press

Why Manners Matter at Work

Articles — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 09:25:00 -0400

For those of you who never bothered to pay attention to your mother, perhaps you'll listen to Peter Drucker, the father of modern management, instead.

This cheeky thought has crept into my head a couple of times in the last few weeks as I've noticed a run of stories about etiquette (or lack thereof) in the workplace. Most recently, there was the case study posted on this Web site (BusinessWeek.com, 8/12/08) about a worker who had to deal with a boorish boss.

And just a couple of weeks ago, I saw that officials in Anaheim, Calif.--home to Disneyland (DIS)-- were set to hold classes for… more

What Drucker Would Say About Mervyns

Articles — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 09:21:00 -0400

Mervyns portrayed itself as a victim of the crummy economy and a miserable retail environment last week as it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. But in truth, a key part of the department store chain went bankrupt long ago. It's what Peter Drucker called the "theory of the business."

Every organization rests upon a set of such premises--fundamental notions about customers and competitors, about technology, about a company's own strengths and weaknesses. When an enterprise fails, Drucker explained, it is often because "the assumptions on which the organization has been built and is being run no longer fit reality."

As obvious as this may seem, it… more

When 2008 Feels Like 1968

Articles — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 14:36:00 -0400

It's been a bummer of a summer, hasn't it?

At the gas station the other night, I found myself staring in disbelief—as I have for weeks—while the numbers on the pump kept spiraling higher and higher. The total: $67.83 to fill my Passat. I hopped back in my car and flipped on the radio, figuring a little music might take my mind off the lightness of my wallet, but the news came on instead: Fannie Mae (FNM) and Freddie Mac (FRE) were reeling. Nervous depositors had stormed IndyMac Bancorp, looking to pull their money. General Motors (GM) was poised for another round of cuts.

Sigh. You… more

Cartooning Obama's Economics

Articles — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 06:46:00 -0400

Among the things I admire most about Barack Obama is the way that he’s able, without sounding wishy-washy, to capture issues in their full complexity – to explain them not in the obtuse terms typical of so many politicians but in a manner that recognizes nuance, that allows for shades of gray.

It’s too bad that the same can’t be said of John R. Talbott’s Obamanomics: How Bottom-Up Economic Prosperity Will Replace Trickle-Down Economics. Instead, much of it presents an overly simple, cartoonish view of the world.

Trumpeting any politician’s platform while he’s still out on the campaign trail can be perilous. Still, I had high… more

Leveraging the Strengths Of the Disabled

Ron Tang — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 07:30:00 -0400

When the House passed legislation in late June that expanded protections for disabled people, it marked an important step forward on an important issue. But what the workplace needs, even more than a new law, is an old insight -- one first offered by Peter Drucker more than 40 years ago.

"To make strength productive is the unique purpose of organization," Drucker wrote in his 1967 classic, The Effective Executive. "It cannot, of course, overcome the weaknesses with which each of us is abundantly endowed. But it can make them irrelevant."

This holds true for everyone, of course. As Drucker noted, "Strong… more

Drucker's Take On Making Mistakes

Ron Tang — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 11:29:00 -0400

Lyndon Johnson occupied the White House when KeyCorp first began raising its dividend. The Beatles topped the pop charts. Martin Luther King Jr. led tens of thousands of civil rights marchers through Alabama.

For 43 straight years, the company's annual payout climbed, "a record we were extremely proud of," in the words of KeyCorp Chief Executive Henry Meyer. That is, until earlier this month. The Cleveland bank, slammed by the weak housing market and an adverse tax ruling, announced that it would halve its dividend to 75 cents in a bid to save $200 million a year. It also said it… more

No Gay Weddings In Kern County

Ron Tang — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 08:14:00 -0400

A few years ago, I heard writer Gerald Haslam explain his struggle to describe the difference between the Kern County burg of Bakersfield and the Bay Area city of Mill Valley, both of which are settings for his novel, "Straight White Male."

"Then it suddenly occurred to me," he said. "There was nobody in Bakersfield who cared whether Tibet was free."

Haslam's remarks came rushing back to me last week with the news that the Kern County clerk will stop performing all civil marriages before June 17, the first day same-sex couples in California can legally apply for licenses.

The clerk, Ann Barnett,… more

Obama's Drucker-Style Win

Ron Tang — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 10:13:00 -0400

As Barack Obama claimed the Democratic nomination for President last week, pundits were quick to credit any number of factors in his vanquishing of the once-vaunted Clinton political machine: Obama's rock-star charisma, his scintillating speechmaking, what he himself has described as his "almost spooky good fortune."

But I chalk it up, in large measure, to one thing: his superior ability -- or at least his advisers' superior ability -- at management, Peter Drucker-style.

In fact, it was almost as if the Obama camp had methodically worked through the five questions with which Drucker believed every organization -- whether a business, public agency,… more

The Seven-Year Rich

Ron Tang — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 09:12:00 -0400

After the brutal bust of 2001, we didn’t expect new masses of multimillionaires to reappear around here quite so fast. But they did -- and this time, no recession will send them packing. A 2008 field guide to a new, super-driven kind of upper class -- whose motives and morés, like it or not, are now part of our DNA.

I. The Penthouse View

On a recent Friday morning, at the end of a week in which the dollar has continued to sink, stocks have fallen deeper into negative territory, and a widely watched measure of leading economic indicators has slipped, I… more

Conditioning the Corporate Athlete

Ron Tang — Thu, 22 May 2008 11:47:00 -0400

Thirty-five years ago, in his classic Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, Peter Drucker declared that the means by which most people had long run their organizations -- through a mix of perks and punishment, rewards and reprimands -- was all but dead.

"The basic fact," Drucker wrote, "is that the traditional... approach to managing, that is the carrot-and-stick way, no longer works."

It was striking, then, to read a few weeks ago of Whirlpool's decision to suspend 39 workers who had claimed to be nonsmokers -- apparently in an attempt to avoid paying a $500 surcharge on their health insurance -- but then… more

Exxon Mobil Needs a Longer View

Ron Tang — Fri, 09 May 2008 07:18:00 -0400

John D. Rockefeller has been described in many different ways: as greedy and cutthroat, as munificent and caring, as "solitary, taciturn, remote, and ascetic," in the words of author Daniel Yergin. But as a manager, perhaps Rockefeller's most indispensable quality was this: He was uncompromisingly forward-looking.

It was Rockefeller, more than any single figure, who helped revolutionize the way people in the 19th century illuminated their homes, hastening the shift from costly whale oil to kerosene -- a fuel that was, as he put it, "cheap and good."

Rockefeller's heirs recently evoked that history, as they went public with their criticism of… more

Dusting Off a Managing Tome

Ron Tang — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 07:28:00 -0400

Of all of Peter Drucker's achievements -- advising captains of industry and heads of state, coining the term "knowledge worker," winning the Presidential Medal of Freedom -- the most remarkable may be this: In 1974, his 800-plus-page tome, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, vaulted past The Joy of Sex on the national best seller list.

Last week, HarperCollins released a revised edition of Management. And regardless of whether it winds up eclipsing Bonk, the latest hot-selling volume on the physiology and psychology of sex, I can tell you this: It deserves a spot on every manager's shelf, much as the Physicians' Desk… more

Peter Drucker's Winning Team

Ron Tang — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 12:23:00 -0400

In the summer of 1985, an executive named Peter Bavasi pored over a Harvard Business Review article by Peter Drucker in which the great management thinker described the "widow maker" -- a job so inherently impossible that it was apt to defeat even the best and brightest.

Drucker's warning, "Any job that ordinarily competent people cannot perform is a job that cannot be staffed," was especially ominous for Bavasi. He had, you see, just become president of the Cleveland Indians, a sports franchise to which the word "hapless" seemed inextricably tied.

So Bavasi called Drucker to seek his counsel, and there began… more

Drucker And the Complexities Of Race

Ron Tang — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 11:22:00 -0400

Long before so much of the nation became fixated on what was being preached inside black churches on Sunday mornings, Peter Drucker would go on occasion and listen for himself.

It was the late 1930s, and Drucker had just landed in New York, having fled the Nazis. Whenever he happened to spend the weekend in Washington, Drucker recalled years later, he would sneak into Rankin Chapel to be "shaken and moved" by Howard Thurman, the chaplain at Howard University. His was the kind of voice, said Drucker, that "reached the inner core of one's being."

Thurman's soul-stirring oratory, as well as relationships… more

Buffett's Plan For Successful Succession

Ron Tang — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 23:00:00 -0400

A couple of weeks ago, Berkshire Hathaway Chairman Warren Buffett officially put the kibosh on what many an investor must have regarded as the ultimate succession plan: "I've reluctantly discarded the notion of continuing to manage the portfolio after my death -- abandoning my hope to give new meaning to the term 'thinking outside the box,'" Buffett, 77, wrote in his annual letter to shareholders.

Despite his tongue-in-cheek approach, Buffett touched on one of the most important issues an enterprise faces: figuring out who's the right person to one day take the reins.

A company's very "survival," Peter Drucker wrote in his… more

Wide-Angle Thinking

Ron Tang — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 15:22:00 -0500

Charles Handy has been called "the Peter Drucker of Britain." But in a sense, pinning Handy to a particular place misses the whole point.

In the last year alone, this venerated thinker and writer on organizational behavior and society has left his home near London to spend time in Hong Kong, China, Romania, Spain, Italy, Denmark, Sweden, and India. He's also made three trips to the U.S., where he just wrapped up a five-week stay as a scholar-in-residence at Claremont Graduate University's Drucker School of Management and the Drucker Institute, of which I am the director.

It was there that… more

What Can Microsoft Offer Yahoo?

Ron Tang — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0500

You'd be hard-pressed to find many things to which Peter Drucker was as openly hostile as the hostile takeover.

In his book The New Realities, he went so far as to call the gobbling up of companies in this fashion "the most serious assault on management in its history -- a far more serious assault than any mounted by Marxists."

Mind you, he made these comments in 1989, when all too many real-life Gordon Gekkos were commanding center stage. What rankled Drucker was the tendency of these corporate raiders to quickly dismantle the enterprises they'd just gotten their hands on,… more

Muhammad Yunus: The Unlikely Disciple

Ron Tang — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500

There is no shortage of people who exemplify Peter Drucker's principles and practices -- a multitude of middle managers and top executives responsible for many millions, if not billions, of dollars in economic activity. Yet the most Drucker-like of all may well be a man who launched his enterprise with a series of transactions totaling 27 bucks.

Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, who pioneered the concept of microcredit -- providing the poorest of the poor with tiny loans to start their own moneymaking ventures -- is promoting a new idea these days. He calls it "social business," and in… more

Wikia's People-Powered Engine

Ron Tang — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500

As I sat down to work on this column, I couldn't help but feel as if I should be lending my voice to the "Wikia Search stinks" chorus. After all, the Internet search engine, rolled out this month by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, didn't seem to be doing much to enhance the standing of my organization, the Drucker Institute.

When I typed our name into the search field, I got reasonably close: The top result that popped up was the Web site for our affiliate, the Peter F. Drucker & Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management. But our own site… more

Where Goes the Neighborhood?

adminn — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 01:15:00 -0500

The new year has begun without Larchmont Hardware, a small shop that opened its doors in 1925 in the middle of Larchmont Boulevard -- a two-block stretch between Beverly Boulevard and 1st Street known in the neighborhood simply as "the village."

It was the sort of store that kept dog bones at the front counter for customers' pets to chew on. Edwin, the clerk, was always happy to chitchat while you scrounged for a single bolt to buy. When Mario, the manager, died in a terrible accident last year, hundreds of Larchmont Hardware regulars showed up for his memorial service.

The hardware… more