Creating Your Future the Peter Drucker Way: A Sneak Preview

If you are attending the SLA Annual Conference in Philadelphia next week, I hope you’ll consider participating in the session I’ll be presenting on June 15th, from 10:00-11:30 AM, Creating Your Future the Peter Drucker Way. On this post, I’ll provide a sneak preview, and why I think it is important for information professionals to hear this message. I recently wrote a guest post for the Government Info Pro blog, 25 Years of Drucker, discussing Drucker’s role in helping to create my future when I was a library school student in 1986, leading to my 2009 book, Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life.  Chapter 3  is “Creating Your Future,” which begins with the following Drucker quote, from Management: Revised Edition, which I reviewed for USA TODAY in 2008: “The purpose of the work on making the future is not to decide what should be done tomorrow, but what should be done today to have a tomorrow.” He also advised to identify and take advantage of “the future that has already happened.” What are the current trends that affect your professional and personal life, and what are the implications for the future? What can you start doing right now to remain relevant in your workplace and in the profession? Many people are getting close to retirement, or could be downsized, or have their library closed down. You may decide to reinvent your life and career by tapping into your willingness to change, and learning from your existing networks and new ones you can create. Giving this presentation, which will also include my 21 minute video interview with Drucker, conducted seven months to the day before he died, at 95, in 2005, has another special meaning for me. Drucker gave one of the keynotes at the SLA Annual Conference in Los Angeles in 2002, and I interviewed him for a feature story in USA TODAY the night before his address. I’d like to think that he would be pleased that things have come full circle, and that his future-oriented ideas will have another opportunity to influence the lives of SLA members.