Peter Drucker was a lawyer and the author of 39 books, among them The Effective Executive in Action. He is considered the most influential business thinker of the 20th century, and he was a mentor to Thomas Koulopoulos, founder of Delphi Group, who decided to share on Inc.com what he learned from Drucker over their ten years as mentor and protégé.
For Koulopoulos, Drucker is one of those people who shine a light so bright that you cannot stop watching and following it in everything to do with business: running a company, leadership, motivation…
These are some of his most important pieces of business advice.
1. Don’t just manage: lead.
Drucker had a problem with the idea of managing knowledge workers. He felt that leadership is a shared responsibility. To lead, in Drucker’s mind, was to empower people, giving them the resources to succeed rather than a road map with step-by-step directions. If that scares you, he said, then you have the wrong people leading your organisation.
2. The way to keep good people is to give them a challenge.
While Koulopoulos was building his company, he did not lose a single one of the eight people on his leadership team. The same can be said of almost all his employees. They paid people fairly, but that is not why they stayed.
Drucker taught him that what drives the best people is a challenge that lets them reach beyond themselves to be part of something bigger. It is what Drucker called a “moon shot”: a goal so big that it creates a gravity that pulls people towards it and keeps them in its orbit. Besides, the only people who are scared off by a challenge are the ones who should be.
See also: 5 business lessons you should never forget
(Read: 8 ways to kill employee motivation)
3. If you are bored, it is your fault.
Drucker did not tolerate laziness. He was constantly on the move. He thought hard work was bad only for people who lack purpose or passion. If you have a reason to work hard and/or a passion for what you do, there will never be enough hours in the day.
But Drucker also balanced work with great passions in other areas of his life: his teaching, his love of Japanese art, and his willingness to mentor and give back.
4. Treat your employees as if they were volunteers.
This is one of those views that seems completely intuitive the first time you hear it. Drucker spent the last part of his career working extensively with non-profit and volunteer organisations.
He wanted to bring a business perspective to non-profits, but he also believed that for-profit organisations could learn a lot from how non-profits attracted volunteers: people who, as he would put it, walk out at the end of the day and come back only if they want to.
(Read: The only two ways to keep your best employees, according to Google’s head of HR)
5. Bury the past.
“The hardest thing to do is to keep a corpse from rotting.” This lesson applies as much to business as to life. People who think their best and brightest moments are behind them cannot see the future.
The best should always be yet to come, so if you are in a dead relationship or have a dead company, try to bring it back to life or get rid of it, because it is going to rot.
6. Be humble.
If anyone had a reason to be arrogant, it was Drucker, says Koulopoulos, who saw how Drucker had been at the forefront of change for hundreds of men and women he helped to succeed.
Yet Drucker was anything but arrogant. “He had no reason to help me, to mentor me, to give me his time, but he did,” says Koulopoulos. “Drucker was brilliant, kind and humble, a person who helped others succeed, and therefore one of the greatest in the business world.”
And now, on to another business great: Jack Welch: 10 wise lessons in business and leadership from the best executive of the 20th century.
Featured image: Jeff McNeill, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
