Drucker’s “Six Rules for Presidents”
“Even the most powerful [presidents] lost effectiveness as soon as they violated these rules.”
— Peter F. Drucker, “Six Rules for Presidents”, The Wall Street Journal
- Is Obama following the rules?
Read more here. - Why “Obama’s success may well hinge on what he chooses not to do.” Read Rick Wartzman’s BusinessWeek column here.
- Making tough choices isn’t just the work of presidents. In a 1999 letter, Rick Warren, who delivered the inaugural invocation, thanked his mentor Peter Drucker “for teaching me about ‘systematic abandonment.’” Read the full letter here.
Is charisma all it’s cracked up to be?
“Effective leadership doesn’t depend on charisma. Dwight Eisenhower, George Marshall, and Harry Truman were singularly effective leaders, yet none possessed any more charisma than a dead mackerel…Charisma does not by itself guarantee effectiveness as a leader.”
— Peter F. Drucker, Managing For the Future
- What makes an effective leader? See page 120 here.
- Watch a young Barack Obama talk about how he weathered a leadership crisis early in his career.
Can government be effective?
“Any organization…needs to rethink itself once it is more than forty or fifty years old. It has outgrown its policies and its rules of behavior. If it continues in its old ways, it becomes ungovernable, unmanageable, uncontrollable.”
— Peter F. Drucker, “Really Reinventing the Government,” The Atlantic
- Can we depend on government to get the right things done? Read more here.
- Watch Ira Jackson, dean of the Drucker School of Management and state Commissioner of Revenue during the “Massachusetts Miracle,” weigh in on what Drucker would have said about the government’s role in today’s turbulent times.
- Why you, as well as Uncle Sam, have a responsibility to be effective.
Read Rick Wartzman’s BusinessWeek column here.
How to make decisions like Lincoln
“Decisions of the kind the executive has to make are not made well by acclamation. They are made well only if based on the clash of conflicting views… Every one of the effective Presidents in American history had his own method of producing the disagreement he needed in order to make an effective decision. Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman—each had his own ways.”
— Peter F. Drucker, The Effective Executive
- Is there enough disagreement in your office to ensure that you’re making good decisions? See page 139 here.