How to Be an Employee the Peter Drucker Way

On May 31, 1964, fifty-four years ago tomorrow, Peter Drucker gave the commencement address at the University of Scranton, in my home town of Scranton, Pa. I was a young boy at the time and was not aware of who Drucker was. Many years later, I wrote about the address in the 2012 blog post “Peter Drucker’s 1964 Commencement Address: The Knowledge Revolution,” and the following year in my book Create Your Future the Peter Drucker Way.

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I was pleasantly surprised to discover recently that the Drucker Archives has posted an online digital copy of the June 1, 1964 Scranton Times article about Drucker’s commencement address, “410 Given Degrees at U of S: Graduates Termed ‘True Capitalists’ by Professor at NYU.” I’ve long had a photocopy of that article, which includes the text of his address, as well as of how he was introduced. Only now do I realize that the latter lists his then-new book Managing for Results incorrectly as Managing for Profit, a title that I doubt he would have liked.

In May 1952, twelve years before he spoke at the University of Scranton, Fortune published his “How to Be an Employee,” which I described in my 2009 book Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life as “a charming article based on an ideal but undelivered college commencement address.”

It occurred to me recently that college and/or high school courses on ‘How to Be an Employee’ could deliver great benefits to society. Perhaps one reason that so many workplaces are dysfunctional and worse is that people learn how to be employees from (often negative) experience, and from observing people who are unworthy role models. Such courses would not be easy to teach or take, but we could draw inspiration from Drucker’s article.  It was anthologized in 1977 in the Harper’s College Press book People and Performance: The Best of Peter Drucker on Management, and the book was reissued by Harvard Business School Press in 2007. 

Here are selected quotes from that article, all of which remain as relevant today as they were in 1952:

Communication:

“This one basic skill is the ability to organize and express ideas in writing and speaking.”
“But as soon as you move one step up from the bottom, your effectiveness depends on your ability to reach others through the spoken or the written word.”

Types of Employees:

“Do you belong in a job calling primarily for faithfulness in the performance of routine work and promising security? Or do you belong in a job that offers a challenge to imagination and ingenuity—with the attendant penalty for failure?”

Size of Company or Organization:

“Do you derive a deep sense of satisfaction from being a member of a well-known organization—General Motors, the Bell Telephone System, the Government? Or is it more important to you to be a well-known and important figure within your own small pond?”

The Rise of the Generalist:

“But there is an increasing demand for people who are able to take in a great area at one glance, people who perhaps do not know too much about any one field—though one should always have one area of real competence. There is, in other words, a demand for people who are capable of seeing the forest rather than the trees, of making over-all judgments.”

Job Promotion:

“Let me repeat: to be promoted is not essential, either to happiness or to usefulness. To be considered for promotion is.”

Beyond the Workplace:

“I have only one more thing to say: to be an employee it is not enough that the job be right and that you be right for the job. It is also necessary that you have a meaningful life outside the job.”

Drucker ends his article on this back-to-basics note: “There are many skills you might learn to be an employee, many abilities that are required. But fundamentally the one quality demanded of you will not be skill, knowledge, or talent, but character.”