Last month I connected for the first time with Niels Pflaeging, founder of the BetaCodex Network, and partner/associate at Red42, based in Wiesbaden, Germany. I was intrigued by his new book What Would Drucker Do?, and I’m grateful to him for answering my questions about his work and career, his writing, and especially the back-story behind the new book, which is anchored by Peter Drucker quotes from a number of different sources.
For the non-specialist reader, how would you characterize your overall work, writing, and research? (Including but not only your new book What Would Drucker Do?)
I started my career working as a finance manager, or controller. Around 2001, I stumbled upon publications of the Beyond Budgeting movement, a community dedicated to researching contemporary, decentralized organizational leadership that would work without centralized steering, without planning and budgeting, and without command-and-control. After a while, that strange new approach to organizing started to make a lot of sense to me. I joined the Beyond Budgeting Round Table, BBRT, as a research director in 2003. In the same year, I published my first book on the topic of organizational research and development.
Since then, I have written dozens of articles and research papers, and eleven books on leadership and transformation. My first book in English, Organize for Complexity, became a business book bestseller. In 2008, I left the BBRT and founded the BetaCodex Network, together with a colleague from Brazil. We noticed that the time had come to create a community that was not merely focused on talking. The BetaCodex movement would promote more than insight and reflection; it would also promote research and action around transformation of entire organizations. This research brought about a whole range of new theories and methods, such as Org Physics, Change-as-Flipping, Cell Structure Design, Relative Targets, and OpenSpace Beta. All these approaches are about bringing more decentralization to organizations everywhere, and about overcoming command-and-control management, for good.
This is where Peter Drucker comes into play, of course. During all those years of working on organizational development and improvement, part of Drucker’s work has resonated very strongly with me, and with our community. Take the advantages of organizational decentralization, a topic that Drucker beautifully and profoundly discussed in 1973, when everybody else was still trying to perfect command-and-control. So Drucker was always one of the heroes of our movement, documented in our Heroes of Leadership white paper, which gathered more than 150,000 views since its publication in 2013.
Throughout my research, I leaned on Peter Drucker’s work again and again, but I never quite reached into the full scope of his work. And I was somehow looking for an opportunity to do something more about Drucker, and some other heroes of organizational leadership. Before I my worked on What Would Drucker Do?, I owned maybe six or seven books of his. Today I have a whole shelf of works by Drucker and about him. And I also did a lot of research into Drucker interviews, videos, and such.
How did you determine the format and choose the quotes and chapter topics for What Would Drucker Do?
On a visit in Brussels earlier this year, I went into lots of little book stores. In the first book store I went to, in downtown Brussels, I found a little, orange book called What Would Arnie Do?. It’s quite a tiny volume, with lifestyle and life choices quotes by Arnold Schwarzenegger. I had always thought highly of Schwarzenegger the man, a true democrat and an independent thinker. That little book of quotes made me curious to learn even more about him and about some of the topics he raised in the quotes. I found the quotes both funny and insightful, on many levels. So then I wondered: Why did this kind of witty, delightful, pretty, and easy-to-read format not exist about people from our field of leadership, work and organizations, or management? Why do we not generally cherish the intellect and wit of the great figures in our field more? Why don’t we quote them more often (and more accurately)? And lastly: who could be the figures one might make such a book about? And so the idea for a little series of books on management thinkers was born. I drew up a list of “heroes” of mine who might be suitable – in terms of quotes and range of topics. The first I picked to compile this kind volume was W. Edwards Deming – the What Would Deming Do? book came out in March. And I knew that the second book of the series just had to be about the work of Peter Drucker. There are several reasons for that. The scope of Drucker’s work was a factor, but also his incredible wit and “quotability.”
Drucker’s quotability has become a problem since his passing, though. If you look up Peter Drucker quotes online today, and look up those quotes more critically, you will find out that maybe 70 percent of supposed Drucker quotes are not his. They are incorrectly attributed and not Drucker’s quotes at all! A good example is “Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” which is wrongly attributed to Drucker a gazillion times online, even though it is clearly not related to Drucker. It is quite shocking how much the line between Drucker’s fabulous insight and misattributed nonsense has blurred. So this is another reason why I think it was time to put out a book with proper Drucker quotes for our times.
I put a lot of thought into the book’s structure. What Would Drucker Do? is an homage to the man and his work. But a linear, timeline-oriented structure would not make sense at all. Almost 20 years after Drucker’s passing, it was also needed to make the actuality, even timelessness of his work shine through. In a book that does not feature any commentary by me, but just Drucker’s original quotes, figuring out a contemporary structure and chapter titles was the only means to transport Drucker’s thinking into our time. The initial chapters are dedicated to the “society of organizations,” and “the knowledge worker,” which are probably the two big threads connecting much of Drucker’s work. The other seven chapters are around big topics of today that I have also dedicated much research to, such as “work & identity,” “performance & purpose,” “decentralize & self-organize,” and “change & transform.”
With hindsight, I guess I could say that Arnold Schwarzenegger made me produce a book on Peter Drucker! Which is quite funny as well, as Drucker and Schwarzenegger are probably history’s most famous Austrian-born Americans, next to the wonderful actor and inventor Hedy Lamarr. By the way: I would also enjoy to read a well-researched book of Hedy Lamarr quotes…
Given that the subtitle of your book is organization/society-oriented, do any particular aspects of Drucker’s work or personal example influence your day to day life, work-related or otherwise?
As much as Peter Drucker is still revered, his impact and his work remain highly underestimated, I think. For example, most of us still find it hard to make the connection between the way we build and lead organizations, and how organizational leadership affects our societies. We cannot make the world a better, more democratic, more just place if organizations do not keep up. Which clearly they currently fail to do! Drucker always accentuated this kind of connection. So the insights compiled in the book clearly have a meaning well beyond the boundaries of work and organizations. They eclipse “organizational development.” All 160 quotes are chosen to be personally insightful, but also to relate to society and how to make democracy and democratic societies stronger. This, I thought, was important to be expressed in the book’s subtitle, Nurture Great Organizations and Societies Guided by Peter Drucker’s Best Quotes. Drucker himself put this so perfectly in his aphorism “Performing, responsible management is the alternative to tyranny and our only protection against it.” Another great quote related well to these times of continued hero cult in media and on the internet: “Beware charisma. Charisma is ‘hot‘ today. There is an enormous amount of talk about, and an enormous amount of books are written about the charismatic leader. But the desire for charisma is a political death wish.”
A lot of quotes in the book are more directly related to work, of course. Like this axiom, which I find precious: “That one can truly manage other people is by no means adequately proven. But one can always manage oneself.” One of many Drucker quotes that I often think about when consulting, or writing and researching – is this one: “The future will not just happen if one wishes hard enough.”