Living in More Than One World

In my previous installment of posts about the new book Drucker: A Life in Pictures, I remarked on the tremendous variety of people who are represented in documents depicted from the Drucker Archives, including Cesar Chavez, Rick Warren and Frances Hesselbein. As the chapter “The Social-Sector Advisor” makes clear, Peter Drucker was a citizen of the highest order. Besides some of the organizations mentioned in my earlier posts, this also illustrates his involvement with CARE International (CARE Foundation International Humanitarian Award; May 24, 1995), the Salvation Army (Evangeline Booth Award, 2001) and Mutual of America (Distinguished Citizens Service Award; April 4, 1991).

I was particularly struck by the photo of the typewritten document “Peter F. Drucker (Partial) List of Community Service Responsibilities 1950-1988.” He separates the list into two categories: (1) Doing, (2) Advisor and Consultant. The first includes (all as Drucker typed it): Trustee-some time Vice-Chairman, Montclair State College, Montclair, NJ, 1960-71;[Drucker lived in Montclair when he taught at New York University]; Board of Directors, American Management Association, 1952-1960; 1972-1976; Commissioner, Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, 1986; Member, Asian Art Council, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1986; Member, Advisory Council, Peace Corps, 1968-1973; President, Society for the History of  Technology.

In category two (again, not repeating organizations from my earlier posts, and as he typed it), the list includes the American Heart Association, University of Pennsylvania, Stanford Graduate Business School, Navajo Indian Tribal Council, International Rescue Committee, Japan House NYC, American Symphony Orchestra League and the Western Association of Hospitals. Those are only some of the organizations on both lists. And all of these responsibilities were on top of his other consulting work, as well as his teaching and writing. Peter Drucker as role model is on full display in this chapter, and in the entire book.

Fortune’s January 14, 2013 edition is The Future Issue; with around one-quarter of the pages devoted to the topic. The magazine explores various dimensions of what tomorrow might be like rooted in work and effort taking place in the present. The centerpiece feature (eight pages long) is “Larry Page Looks Ahead,” about the Google CEO/co-founder’s vision for the company and its potential game-changer initiatives like self-driving cars. The article, by Miguel Helft, portrays a company in constant motion, reinventing itself 24/7; appropriate for a service that has to be always available, with no exceptions or downtime.

Other features include “Meet Your Next Surgeon,” on robotics in the operating room, such as the da Vinci, from the Silicon Valley company Intuitive Surgical. Also mentioned is the experimental research platform Raven, by Applied Dexterity, a recently formed company spun off from the University of Washington. “The $50 billion question,” Ryan Bradley writes, “for the future of surgery: Will there be (operating) room for more than one kind of robot?” If you want to know more about the future of the intersection of brands and pop culture, see Daniel Roberts’ “Will.i.am, Hit Machine.” It details the future-focused work the Black Eyed Peas rapper is providing for companies like Intel and Coca-Cola, whose CEO Muhtar Kent calls him a “visionary.” A shorter section, “The Future Dispatches,” briefly tackles a variety of issues with implication for the future. One, “Teaching Watson the Meaning of ‘OMG,’” concerns the work of Eric Brown of IBM to program computers to understand slang. There is also a short Q&A with technology pioneer/inventor/author/futurist Ray Kurzweil about his new book, How to Create a Mind. And to complete the circle of the future, it was announced in December Kurzweil is joining Google as a director of engineering.

During a recent visit to New York City, I stumbled in to Edward Tufte’s gallery, ET Modern, only moments before he was to give a free talk at 2:00 PM. I had been meaning to visit the gallery, near the spectacular High Line in Chelsea, and fortuitously walked in oblivious to the fact that he would not only be there, but would be giving a periodic “report” on progress for his artistic work. Tufte, whom I also wrote about in 2009, remains a whirlwind of activity at 70. He is variously an artist, author, entrepreneur, teacher, scientist and philosopher. His gallery includes only his artworks, and also sells copies of his large, beautifully-produced self-published books on how best to convey graphical and statistical information, the most recent being 2006’s Beautiful Evidence. In 2010, President Obama appointed him as a member of the  Recovery Independent Advisory Panel. He consults, works as an artist/sculptor and teaches one-day courses around the country, “Presenting Data and Information.” All this comes after 33 years of teaching at Yale and Princeton. The main part of his talk was illustrated with projections of photos of his large-scale, open-space sculptures. He then answered questions about a variety of topics, including how he works and manages his time. He figures that he has perhaps ten more years of productive work. He also stayed to talk informally with people afterward. Although he is famous, he makes himself accessible. There is a demand for his work, and a continued interest in what he is doing and thinking, with considerable media coverage.

He is a role model for today’s knowledge workers, by building on a considerable body of work developed over many years; teaching and learning; being highly entrepreneurial (he self-published before it was the cool thing to do) and remaining relevant, with a name synonymous with quality. Whether or not he would consider it in these terms, he has a stellar personal brand. Drawing lessons from his work, and how he accomplishes that work, can be crucial for those faced with the necessity of producing a consistent high-quality output, making our thoughts understood and creating and sustaining a market for our work.

October is award season. The first of the Nobel prizes are now being announced. And last week we learned of the new group of MacArthur Foundation fellows, who have been awarded what are popularly known as “Genius Grants”. I especially look forward to the MacArthur awards every year. The stories about the awardees and what they have studied and worked on provides a window into human accomplishment, originality and the art of possibility. They introduce us to highly accomplished people we might not have heard of otherwise, particularly if they are working in fields we don’t normally follow. The winners receive $500,000 payable over five years; no strings attached. The foundation decides who gets the fellowships, and you can’t apply. The announcements invariably come as a surprise to those who are chosen. I particularly like how future-oriented the awards are. The foundation explains that the fellowships are “an investment in a person’s originality, insight, and potential. Indeed, the purpose of the MacArthur Fellows Program is to enable recipients to exercise their own creative instincts for the benefit of human society.”

This year’s group is typically eclectic, with a variety of doctors/scientists, writers, (including the novelist Junot Diaz), filmmakers, musicians, photographers and others. The MacArthur website also has profiles of all 873 Fellows going back to the first awards in 1981. It adds up to a fascinating record of human achievement and potential, though for a slightly different take on the process, read Emma Gilbey Keller’s October 2 post on theguardian.  Most of us are not going to be MacArthur Fellows, let alone winners of Nobel Prizes. Yet reading these profiles makes us realize that we can strive to do the kind of work that would be worthy of such notice, whether we receive it or not. We all read, do research, carry out work each day in our various fields, collaborate, plan for the future and so on. Think of yourself as the potential winner of your own private fellowship. And then live up to it.

When USA TODAY celebrated its 30th anniversary earlier this month, it unveiled a major rebranding in print, and partially/eventually in its various digital formats. (I worked at USAT for 21 years, from 1987-2008. I was a librarian the entire time, and during the final 12 years, I also wrote about business and management books for the Money section.) A separate, 16 page section of the anniversary edition (enhanced by videos online) is USA TOMORROW: Leaders Foresee a Fascinating Future World, in which various “visionaries” are interviewed about where they see the world going in their various spheres thirty years from now, in 2042.
USA TODAY has always been about looking ahead; not just recapping what happened in the news yesterday (or today) but trying to provide context for what it means now and in the future. All of these interviews are worth reading. Chances are that many of the predictions will not come to pass. But the interviewees are indeed leaders who have placed themselves in the position to create the future in their own fields, so we are more likely to use their words as a guide to where the world is headed in the relatively short or medium term.
Some of the best among the 18 interviews:
City living: Cover Story by Rick Hampson on Andres Duany; co-founder and guru of the New Urbanism movement
Films: James Cameron; director of Avatar and Titanic
Music: Antonio “L.A.” Reid; producer and chairman/CEO of Epic Records
The Economy: Marc Andreessen; venture capitalist, online pioneer, co-founder of Netscape
Education: Sebastian Thrun; Google VP, Stanford professor, founder of Udacity
Driving: Bill Ford; executive chairman of Ford Motor
Andreessen provides some serious food for thought: “The spread of computers and the Internet will put jobs in two categories. People who tell computers what to do, and people who are told by computers what to do.” And some things will unfortunately remain predictable; as made plain by the title of the sidebar running with the piece on the director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins: “What Won’t Be Cured? Death.”

I enjoyed yesterday’s report by Lisa Napoli for NPR Morning Edition, Buddhist Meditation: A Management Skill? It features my friend Jeremy Hunter, a professor at the Drucker-Ito School in Claremont, Cal. He was one of the first people I met when I went to Claremont in 2002 to do research for my book, Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life. Jeremy teaches mindfulness (including meditation) and self-management, geared to the needs and expectations of MBA students. I sat in on one of his classes in 2005. In 2010, he and Scott Scherer contributed a chapter, Knowledge Worker Productivity and the Practice of Self-Management, to the book The Drucker Difference.

Applying the principles of mindfulness to work, which I wrote about in early 2011, remains a hot topic. The MBA-oriented site Poets & Quants recently ran a three-part series by Deborah Knox, Train Your Mind, Improve Your Game: Meditation for the 21st-Century Leader. Workplace.com had a September 6 feature about mindfulness training and multitasking. The August 21 Chicago Tribune piece Be Mindful for a Better Workplace quotes Mirabai Bush, co-founder and Associate Director of the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, who is interviewed in an extensive feature in transform, Mirabai Bush: The Work of Compassionate Action.
Bill George, the former CEO of Medtronic turned best-selling author and Harvard Business School professor, has given a considerable boost of credibility to mindfulness and meditation for the benefit of work. In particular, see his 2010 post about a two-day mindful leadership retreat. Having returned from Japan not long ago, I was interested to see Overcoming stress / Psychological, physical methods for mindfulness in The Daily Yomiuri Online on September 9. The British site Personneltoday.com ran Mindfulness: helping employees to deal with stress, on September 3.
There are also a lot of good mindfulness resources for work and beyond at mindful.org. In fact, there are so many good print and online resources about mindfulness that it is difficult to be sufficiently mindful when writing a blog post about mindfulness!

A major highlight of my just-completed course, The Special Library/Information Center, at the Catholic University of America School of Library and Information Science, was The 17th Special Libraries Symposium, held on August 25th.
Eleven panelists donated their time to meet with my students: Joanne Berger- FDA Biosciences Library; Linda Broussard- SLA/Special Libraries Association; Cameron Gowan- Jones Day; James King- The National Institutes of Health; Rick Kowalski- Consumer Electronics Association; Thomas Mann- Library of Congress; Jennifer McMahan- U.S. Department of Justice; Susan O’Brian- The American Prospect; Angela Titone- Consumer Electronics Association; Joan Weeks- Library of Congress/CUA SLIS and Amanda Wilson- U.S. Department of Transportation. Our special guest on the panel was Derek Attig, a doctoral student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who was this summer’s 2012 Google Policy Fellow at the American Library Association’s Washington, D.C. office.
Among the key takeaways on to how to begin and progress through a career journey in special libraries and related fields:
1. Get involved in SLA or a related professional association, where you can develop leadership skills, take on unfamiliar responsibilities, build friendships and your personal network, and stretch professionally.
2. Learn about contracts and how they are negotiated. Sit in on contract negotiations, and if necessary, learn about these areas away from the library.
3. Sign up for free webinars, including ones in different fields, to learn content and discover how they are produced.
4. Investigate the potential of becoming an electronic resource librarian, and become familiar with how mobile apps can serve organizations.
5. You may have to create your own job, or look for jobs not in libraries, but that call on library-like skills. Don’t limit yourself.
6. Keep developing your writing and presentation skills.
I’m grateful that the panelists made the time on a hot summer evening to help prepare a new generation of information professionals for success in this brave new world.

Many notable people will be delivering commencement addresses on campuses across the country this month. But it is worth looking back to May 31, 1964, when Peter Drucker delivered the commencement addresses at the University of Scranton, in Scranton, Pa.  I was born and raised there, and in 2010 I wrote about my return to the city in May of that year, to give a presentation about my book based on Drucker’s work.
The June 1, 1964 edition of The Scranton Times published a transcript of Drucker’s talk, though it is not online. (However, the Drucker Archives has an online photo of his honorary doctorate degree.) While congratulating the all-male graduates – the school began admitting women in 1972 – he reminded them of the responsibility to put their knowledge to work for the benefit of as many people as possible. He said their years of education represented sacrifices from parents and money from taxpayers; and that it wasn’t long before when most people left school at 14 to go to work.  Hopes for a society “free from prejudice” and other injustices depended on these and similar graduates;  “the first generation of the “knowledge revolution” who will have to prove whether we have invested our faith, our resources and our hopes wisely or foolishly.”
Familiar themes from his books of that period were sounded; the change from producing things to knowledge work; the relatively new demand for educated people and how teaching hadn’t changed much in hundreds of years. “But what education and knowledge mean to society, that has changed drastically, and within the lifetime of the older generation still living.”
Drucker said that power and influence should not be used for selfish ends. They and others like them around the country faced “a very much brighter future than young people have ever faced before.” That, however, also brought a considerable challenge: “I hope you will remember that in turn it is your responsibility to put our knowledge and your education to work where they produce the most – for you, for your families, for your society, for your country and for mankind.”

What did Peter Drucker have in common with Bob Dylan and The Beatles? More than you might initially think. All were/are at the top of their fields; all were/are prolific, serious innovators. They also changed their initial styles of expression from their early to more mature work.
Beyond that, there are interesting geographic angles. Drucker, who was born in Vienna, Austria in 1909, began working as a clerk apprentice, and studying law at Hamburg University, in Germany, in 1927. This was a formative time for him, which included being introduced to great works of literature by a local librarian, and also attending the opera on a student ticket to hear what became a life-changing work, Verdi’s Falstaff.  Thirty- three years later, in 1960, The Beatles left Liverpool and did their own apprenticeship in Hamburg; playing grueling hours in the city’s gritty clubs. Their experiences formed the basis for the polished, groundbreaking band they would later become.
Drucker moved to the United States in 1937, and in 1950 began teaching at the Graduate Business School of New York University (now New York University Stern School of Business), an association that would last for two decades. While he was teaching at NYU, Bob Dylan moved from Minnesota to New York City’s Greenwich Village, in 1961. It’s fascinating to think that while Dylan was doing his world-changing work in the 1960s, Drucker was in the same city all along, teaching, consulting and writing some of his most important books, such as The Effective Executive and The Age of Discontinuity. While it’s tempting to think that Dylan and Drucker could have bumped into each other on the streets of the village near the NYU buildings, my understanding is that Drucker’s classes were actually held in the Wall Street area, so it is unlikely their paths crossed. (If anyone knows differently, I’d love to hear about it!)
People will still be reading Drucker’s books, and listening to the music of Dylan and The Beatles far into the future. And none of it would have happened without those early days of apprenticeship and inspiration.

I’ve been fascinated by the National Football League and National Basketball Association player drafts for a long time. A fun part of my job during 21 years (1987-2008) as a reference librarian at USA TODAY was researching articles for the Sports section, including those on the drafts. This year’s NFL draft was held last week, and the media coverage was the most intense ever, especially from national outlets like USA TODAY and ESPN, which broadcast the draft live, in prime time.
As expected, the first two picks were quarterbacks: Stanford’s Andrew Luck, chosen by the Indianapolis Colts, followed by Baylor’s Robert Griffin III, to the Washington Redskins. But the draft, even with intense scouting, interviewing and statistical research, is not an exact science. Success at quarterback is particularly difficult to predict, as shown in a 2008 article in The New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell, Most Likely to Succeed: How do we hire when we can’t tell who’s right for the job? Lots of high-round draft choices fizzle, while low-round choices end up becoming superstars. The most famous of those cases in recent years has been New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, who wasn’t chosen until the 6th round of the 2000 draft. For an enlightening look at low-round picks who made it big, check out the NFL.com photo essay Best late-round NFL draft steals since merger.
Brady and the other draft “steals” illuminate something important that reflects much of the interest in this big-money business exercise. Teams, players and fans are given a sense of hope – if only for a short time – that the future will be better than the past. Or in the case of the top-of-the-standings teams, that their success can be sustained in the future. That sense of hope will be transferred to the basketball world soon. It’s less than two months to June 28th, the date of the NBA draft. More futures (individually and team-wide) are about to be created, for better or worse.