Living in More Than One World

Rich Karlgaard, Forbes publisher and columnist, points out in his August 17 commentary Drucker’s Final Words On Leadership: Manage yourself before you take on responsibility for others, that people who aspire to become leaders must get their own life in order. It’s a brief and to-the-point column; mostly drawing attention to and setting the context for a link to the full text of Peter Drucker’s 1999 Harvard Business Review article Managing Oneself. The latter is an excerpt from Drucker’s important book from the same year, Management Challenges for the 21st Century. I was pleased to see Karlgaard’s column, since the subject matter dovetails perfectly with the self-development theme of my new book, Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life. Also read the insightful interview Peter Drucker On Leadership, conducted by Karlgaard for Forbes.com and published on Nov. 19, 2004, Drucker’s 95th birthday and almost exactly a year before he died. Excerpts from that interview are included in a book I reviewed in 2006 for USA TODAY, The Effective Executive in Action: A Journal for Getting the Right Things Done, a workbook by Drucker and Joseph A. Maciariello, based on Drucker’s classic 1967 book The Effective Executive. (Excerpts from the HBR article are also included.) Reading both the Drucker article/chapter and the Forbes.com interview shows how timeless Drucker’s ideas on self-management are, and why we need to learn about and apply them in today’s world of uncertainty. “Successful careers are not planned,” he writes in the HBR piece. “They develop when people are prepared for opportunities because they know their strengths, their method of work, and their values.” In the interview, he said: “I’ve seen a great many people who are exceedingly good at execution, but exceedingly poor at picking the important things. They are magnificent at getting the unimportant things done.”

Another brief entry today, to note a follow-up to yesterday’s blog about my guest post on the Leader to Leader Institute blog. My new book, Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life, is now featured as the recommended reading on Leader to Leader’s July online newsletter, Leading Today. The newsletter has lots of interesting material, including Susan Phillips Bari’s President’s Letter about the July 13th inaugural event of the Hesselbein Global Leadership Academy at the University of Pittsburgh. The Academy is named for Leader to Leader Institute Chairman and Founding President Frances Hesselbein, who wrote the foreword to my book. The keynote address was delivered by Jim Collins. The newsletter also has an account of a June conference in Seoul, South Korea (attended by Hesselbein, Bari and Leader to Leader Board Secretary Geneva Johnson) The Key to Responsible High-Performing Society, “the first of a series of events being held around the world to honor Peter Drucker’s life and work on the centennial of his birth.” My book was also the subject of a great July 23rd post by Stephen Abram, on his widely-followed Stephen’s Lighthouse blog.  Stephen is Vice President of Innovation for SirsiDynix. He references Drucker’s keynote address at the SLA annual conference in Los Angeles in 2002, and that “Drucker would have been 100 this year, just like SLA.”

A short post today to note that I’ve written more on the back story of my new book, Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life, in a guest post, The Privilege of Writing a Book about Peter Drucker, on the Leader to Leader Institute blog. Frances Hesselbein, the Chairman and Founding President of Leader to Leader, wrote the foreword to my book. From 1990-2002, the organization was called the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management, and Drucker played an active role. But well before those years, Hesselbein also worked with him when she was the CEO of the Girl Scouts of the USA, and he did considerable pro bono work for the organization. Besides the above guest post, I did another, Drucker’s Wisdom: Five Nuggets, for my publisher, Berrett-Koehler, in the July 23 edition of their lively and informative bi-weekly online newsletter, the BKCommuniqué. My book is also one of the spotlight features in the newsletter, which is free and well worth subscribing to. It continues to be an exciting time for me as I’m starting to hear early, encouraging feedback from people who have read the book. I would love to hear more, whether or not you’ve finished reading it!

I have just returned from the American Library Association annual conference in Chicago, where I did my first book signing for Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life. It was a huge success, thanks to the hosts for the event, the great people at Ingram Publisher Services, the distributor for my publisher, Berrett-Koehler. I signed 150 books in one hour at the Ingram booth, for librarians and other information professionals. Because it was such a whirlwind, I couldn’t talk for very long to each person in line. But I quickly learned the ropes about the protocol, such as to find out if the person you are signing for wants a personal inscription, or just signature and date. There was quite a variation of preferences. Some also wanted it inscribed to them personally, others to their library. It was nice that I could sign on a lucky date, 7-11-09. Although I had never met most of the people, some friends were there, including Duane Webster, the recently retired executive director of the Association of Research Libraries. That was really meaningful to me, as I started seriously studying Drucker’s works in the summer of 1986, for a library management course Duane taught at the Catholic University of America’s School of Library and Information Science. For more on that back story, see the recent guest post I did for the Government Info Pro blog. Marydee Ojala, the editor of ONLINE, also did a wonderful post, complete with a photo of me signing books, on the Infotoday blog. When I left the conference, I found out that the book is now in stock on Amazon, a major milestone for my author journey. Starting tomorrow, and for at least the next couple of days, I’ll blog about what I learned and experienced at the sessions and exhibit hall.

Although it was written for a journalism-related readership, I think any knowledge worker can gain valuable insights from a guest column I wrote this week for the website 21st News, Lessons Learned from Peter Drucker: A Guide For the Future. It’s partly a personal look at how I have been living and applying some of the principles in my forthcoming book, Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life, before and after my layoff last December from USA TODAY. But it is mainly a short guide to how people can apply some of the principles in their own lives, based around five areas: teaching, continuous learning, mentoring, volunteering and reflecting. I pointed out Drucker’s stellar journalism credentials: besides his many books, he contributed for many years to such publications as The Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic Monthly, Forbes, Harvard Business Review and many others. He embodied high-minded achievement, delivered with integrity. He was the kind of role model that knowledge workers can emulate if they are working or not working, looking for a new job or thinking of changing professions. 21st News describes itself as  “a comprehensive Web site about the future of journalism and the news business.” The guest column was for Grant’s Angle, the blog by the site’s founder and editor, Grant Perry. Judging from his bio, he is a great example of being multidimensional and living in more than one world. I’m grateful for the opportunity he provided me to contribute to his site.

I spent seven days, from last Sunday through Friday, at three different conferences and workshops, beginning with the American Independent Writers Annual Conference in Washington, D.C, on June 13, the 100th annual conference of the Special Libraries Association/SLA, also in D.C., June 14-17, and the Berrett-Koehler Authors Cooperative marketing workshop, hosted by ASTD, the American Society of Training & Development, in Alexandria, Va., on June 18-19. Berrett-Koehler is publishing my first book, Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life, in August. I had the opportunity to meet and learn from a number of my fellow B-K authors at the workshop. I found them all to be talented, generous people. Over the two days there were many top-notch speakers and workshop leaders to guide us through such areas as marketing, publicity, selling, the effective use of social networking technology and finding public speaking opportunities. At the end of the workshop, everyone participated in a brief but intense co-consulting session, in which groups of four or five people helped each other think through something we want to work on immediately, and we had to report to the larger group what we’re going to do about it. This was a great vehicle for helping me focus my efforts on promoting the book, as we get closer to publication. Thanks to everyone who put on the workshop and ran it so smoothly, and to the many people who shared their knowledge and experience with a first time author.

It’s appropriate that this week I am at the 100th annual conference of the Special Libraries Association/SLA, in Washington, D.C., and also carrying around the galleys of my book, Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life, which will be published by Berrett-Koehler on August 10th.  Drucker was born in 1909, the year SLA began. He gave one of the keynotes at the 2002 annual conference in Los Angeles. I interviewed him for a feature story in USA TODAY the night before he gave his address, and I started work on my book later that year. At the 2006 SLA annual conference in Baltimore, I gave a work-in-progress presentation on my book, screening my 21 minute video interview with Drucker, which was conducted in 2005. Now things have more or less come full circle:  I’m back at SLA – the course I teach at the Catholic University School of Library and Information Science is built around the conference – and my book will be published shortly. If you see me at the conference, please introduce yourself!

My second and final day at the ASTD International Conference & Exposition, in Washington, D.C. was a big success. I met more training and development professionals, and a number of people working for vendors/exhibitors who are attempting to sell products and services to this community.  I am including links to a handful of the companies and organizations of booths I visited. Since most people reading this will not have been at the conference, checking out their websites is the next best thing. WildWorks, a Dallas-based facilitation company, is featuring a new product, Drucker Unpacked, that gives organizations the capability to conduct self-facilitated workshops around Peter Drucker’s principles. They have ten kits based around various topics of Drucker’s management concepts. As of this writing, the package is not yet featured on their site. There are also a number of interesting publishers represented at the conference, including Wiley, HRD Press (Human Resource Development Press) and Simple Truths, which specializes in short inspirational and leadership books and DVDs. And as I mentioned Monday and Tuesday, my own publisher, Berrett-Koehler has a booth. Other organizations/sites worth checking out include GS Graduate School, American Management Association and Soundview Executive Book Summaries. If you couldn’t attend this year, the ASTD 2010 International Conference & Exposition will be held in Chicago, May 16-19, 2010.

Ira Jackson, the dean of Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management at the Claremont Graduate University, has written The View From Drucker: Drucker Apps, in the May 23 Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, about an innovative regular feature on the Drucker Institute website. Twice a month, since January 29 of this year, the Institute takes a topic and includes information on various facets from Peter Drucker, in the form of excerpts from relevant passages of his books, material from the voluminous online Drucker Archives and videos or audio files featuring Drucker or outside experts. There is also the full text related to the topic from The Drucker Difference columns on BusinessWeek.com by Rick Wartzman, the director of the Drucker Institute. You can subscribe, or access Drucker Apps from the website. “Each bi-weekly App,” Jackson writes, “is designed to be timely and play off something in the recent news.”  He describes the May 9 feature on volunteering, which has eight different features, including a short Drucker video, and the text of a speech Drucker gave to the Economic Club of Washington in 1991. The Drucker Apps for May 23 is about finding and keeping jobs. The ten features — one section is intriguingly headed “Help Wanted” (if you help yourself first)” – include the full text of a 1957 speech Drucker gave to the Eleventh International Management Congress in Paris, “The Problems of Maintaining Continuous and Full Employment.” There is also a video and book excerpt from William Cohen, president of the Institute of Leader Arts, and a former PhD student of Peter Drucker.  A final note: there is a Q&A with Rick Wartzman about The Drucker Institute and The Drucker Societies in my forthcoming book, Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life.

I’m about to begin a teaching semester, and many of us will be either teaching, taking classes, pursuing degrees or involved in self-learning ventures this summer. In that spirit, you should benefit from Tad Waddington’s short and to-the-point May 22 Smarts blog on Psychology Today, Smarts: Four things worth learning about learning. Waddington, author of the book Lasting Contribution: How to Think, Plan, and Act to Accomplish Meaningful Work, demonstrates how with additional focused effort and thinking about what we are trying to learn, we’ll gain greater understanding and recall. This is especially true today when we are bombarded by so much material online, in print and on TV and radio. If you add that to the material you are teaching or learning, it can create serious information overload.  He suggests such strategies as reading and re-reading a passage for understanding, but then writing out or saying aloud its meaning.  Also: doing something backward as well as forward (it seems like this one can be fairly tricky), retesting to see if you really understand what you’re trying to learn or accomplish (see how he references Peter Drucker on this one) and trying to understand the theory or principle behind a fact, not just the fact itself. He intriguingly calls the latter behavior “a self-imposed learning disability.” That concept gives us something to think about as we transition to the summer months: how do we hold ourselves back by the way we think and learn?