Management as a Liberal Art Research Institute

If You Don’t Know, Ask Your Brain

William A. Cohen, Ph.D.

PUBLISHED:

Aug 01, 2023

Drucker developed five written questions which he recommended that managers ask in developing their businesses. As time went on, Drucker and others added additional questions to the original five. Clearly the number of questions is infinite though some are more or less important depending on the situation. But most important is how you ask to get an answer that is usable.

 

Questions Most Effective When You Ask Your Computer Directly

I realized that it was effective for the manager to ask the questions because the manager owns the best computer available, that portable computer each of us carries around known as the human brain. You have already accumulated valuable data on this computer to solve all kinds of problems -you just have to access it properly.

 

The Best Computer Requires Proper Use


I wasn’t surprised when I was introduced to Drucker’s use of the brain because for many years, I had asked myself questions and received answers. I would not have thought of most answers if I hadn’t asked myself these questions. I stumbled on this method years earlier, and it had already played an important role in my life.  When I was 14 years old my distance vision suddenly declined. My father was an Air Force officer, and I was examined by an experienced flight surgeon who declared that it was nothing serious merely that I needed eyeglasses. After my examination and receiving the prescription for the glasses, I told him that I didn’t care that I wore glasses, but that I wanted to go to West Point and fly in the Air Force. This doctor immediately advised me to forget these goals and pursue some other career as I would never be able to meet the vision requirements for either objective. Both had strict visual requirements without glasses. He added that he had seen this happen with dozens of youngsters who wanted to attain these ambitions. Even as he spoke, without my speaking aloud, and without thinking I asked my brain what I should do. I was surprised to receive an immediate reply, and I assumed that I had done something right. This occurred even as the doctor continued to talk and explain that it was impossible for me to meet the West Point and Air Force vision standards without glasses and this disqualified me. He suggested that I apply to a local college when I became 17 and join the Air Force through ROTC, requesting one of the  non-flying specialties which the Air Force had need of and forget West Point or flying. Meanwhile my brain had silently repeated its explicit advice: “Go to the base library and find a book which explains sight without glasses.”

 

I had never seen or heard of such a book, but my brain clearly had. I said nothing to the flight surgeon who was only trying to save me from the wasted effort of pursuing what he saw as an unattainable career because of my poor vision. However, as soon as I left the doctor’s office I went straight to the base library. With the librarian’s help I located a book which had actually had the title, “Sight without Glasses.” I read the book and wrote to its author, Dr. Harold M. Peppard, an optometrist. I explained my ambitions and why it was necessary that I have good vision without glasses. Dr. Peppard had been trained by an ophthalmologist, Dr. William Bates, who had developed eye exercises for improving vision without wearing glasses. When Dr. Bates died, Dr. Peppard, continued his practice, and wrote the book. He answered my letter at once with additional exercises and suggestions. I did further research. The method was controversial, some even saying it could harm the eyes. However, there were also many success stories in the book, and I began the program as he suggested. I did these eye exercises about an hour a day, every day, after school. My eyesight slowly began to improve. Four years later I passed the tests for West Point including the vision exam. I graduated from West Point and again improved my vision with new exercises and began an Air Force career which included flying several thousand hours in B-52 bombers as a navigator-bombardier and in attack aircraft in combat as an air commando and instructor. Later I even had the good fortune to work with PVH Weems, a famous retired Navy captain, who had graduated from Annapolis in the class of 1914 and was known as the “father of air navigation.” In the 1930s he had taught Charles Lindbergh celestial navigation on the orders of President Roosevelt after Lindbergh had made his famous solo flight from New York to Paris and was looking for new challenges. Weems had recently been recalled from retirement by the Navy to develop a manual means of space navigation and invited my participation.

 

The Power of the Brain


The power of the human brain is truly amazing, and this was known and used not only by Drucker, but also by such famous scientists as Albert Einstein, and reportedly by others even earlier. Einstein had published four major scientific papers in a single year using these principles and was awarded the Nobel Prize in theoretical physics by communicating with and taking the advice of his brain!

 

I think that what happened to me was that my question focused my brain on everything it had on file in my memory about vision improvement without glasses that I had missed or forgotten. To this day I don’t know exactly where I heard about “sight without glasses” and still don’t. When I used this method for other purposes in later years, I knew that some “brain instructions” came from my own experience, but also from unknown sources: a course lesson , a professional article, something I’d seen on TV or in a movie, something I read or had heard on the radio, or someone had said offhand. This apparently was stored in my mental computer and released in response to the questions I asked myself. My brain had not explained or discussed the method used by Drs. Bates and Peppard. But it had given me the title of Peppard’s book. Dr. Peppard’s advice, encouragement and instructions did the rest. The process of improving my vision took some months, but when I took the West Point test, I had passed.

 

Talking to Yourself


Drucker had developed his five questions for the purpose of running a business. However, since I had some experience with the method, I knew it worked and that it could help me to solve other problems. It always helped.

 

I asked a psychologist about this. He told me that one reason this worked is that my brain already had all the facts necessary for problem resolution stored away in my memory. While these facts could not always be accessed easily, by eliminating various blocks and fears associated with my questioning, the forces preventing an answer dissipated and I could access the information I needed.

 

Sometimes the pressures and stresses are too great. The problem is either too difficult or the situation is too demanding. Your brain cannot function easily and cannot always present a solution under these conditions. But the brain can work subconsciously, even if the conscious brain can’t. The challenge then is getting to the subconscious. Some say the best way to obtain a solution you don’t have from your brain is just to go to sleep and wake up with the solution after a short nap or a night’s sleep. I’ve seen this work.

 

Other techniques also work. Thomas Edison, the inventor, was said to have developed and used a technique of sitting quietly in a darkened room and letting his mind wander. Others perform some activity to distract themselves such as playing a game or even physical exercise. Suddenly the solution appeared.

 

Research professors at Carnegie Mellon University found that getting the subconscious to provide guidance worked if another problem was presented to distract the brain for a short period, while allowing the subconscious mind to continue to work.

 

Drucker’s use of written questions to ask your brain may be different, but it works, and can be used to solve a variety of problems. Try it and see for yourself!

 

Useful References

The Art of the Leader, 3rd Edition by William A. Cohen (Pyramid Press, 2018)


Drucker’s Way to the Top by William A. Cohen (LID, 2019)


The Art of the Strategist (audio version) by William A. Cohen (Harper Collins, forthcoming, 2023-24)

 

The Specifics of Management of the Knowledge Worker

By Ryan Lee • 07 Nov, 2024
Nowhere is management theory demanded more than in managing the knowledge worker, and yet nowhere is management theory more inadequate in addressing a field’s issues than in knowledge work. This is the point Peter Drucker posited in his work Management Challenges for the 21st Century (1991), and to resolve it he came up with six factors that determine the productivity of the management worker. Among these, his final point that management workers “must be treated as an ‘asset’ rather than a ‘cost’” by any given organization is an important concept1. While it only gradually emerged within management theory over the century, it is crucial for any employer and any government to understand and apply if they are to retain a competitive advantage going into the future. Historically, management theory has been about improving the output of the worker through banal efficiency: how to increase the production of steel per head, how to increase the production of cars per hour, how to minimize deficient products, etc. In all these considerations, the worker is a disposable resource. When he is hired, he is set to a particular task that is typically repetitive and thus easily taught, and when he is not needed because of shortcomings in his work, company difficulties, or automation, he is laid off. Referred to as “dumb oxen”, workers were seen in management theory as machines to have productivity squeezed out of. The shift from a majority manufacturing to service-based economy during the first half of the twentieth century changed this dynamic to some extent. The American postwar economic boom introduced the office worker as a common source of employment. This trend continued throughout the conglomerate era of the 1960s and was helped by the decline of the American manufacturing industry in the 1970s. Now in a stage dominated by service and knowledge work, the American economy must approach management differently. The aforementioned cost-asset shift is a demonstration of why this is so, as Drucker’s emphasis on the knowledge worker’s autonomy means that they wield control, not only within their job but over who they should work for as well. This in addition to the high-capital nature of knowledge workers means that the old management theory approach to labor as disposable will backfire catastrophically for any company that tries it with their knowledge workers. It is also important to remember the demographic trends of the United States, and more so the world, in considering why the cost-asset shift is vital. For all of human history until some fifty years ago, population was considered to be in tandem with economic power, given larger populations yielded larger labor forces and consumer markets. Economic growth was thus also correlated with population growth, demonstrated by the historic development of Europe and the United States and the more recent examples of the developing world. Consequently, the worldwide decline in fertility rates, and the decline in population numbers in some developed countries, signals economic decline for the future. In the labor market, smaller populations mean fewer jobs that produce for and service fewer people. Although the knowledge worker has grown in proportion to the total labor market, these demographic declines will affect knowledge workers as well, meaning employers will have a vested interest in retaining their high-capital labor. To enforce this, the cost-asset shift will have to come into play. The wants and needs of the knowledge worker pose a unique challenge in the field of management. Autonomy, for the first time, can be regarded as a significant factor affecting all other aspects of this labor base. What good does a large salary provide a knowledge worker if they don’t feel that they are welcome at an institution? How would they perceive that their work is not being directed towards productive pursuits at their corporation, especially given the brain work and dedication given to it? Of course, the fruits of one’s labor has been a contentious issue in management ever since compensation and workers’ rights became a universal constant with the Industrial Revolution, but this is augmented by the knowledge worker’s particular method of generating value. Given that Drucker poses their largest asset and source of value as their own mind, they will intrinsically have a special attachment to their work almost as their brainchild. Incentivizing the knowledge worker is also only one part of this picture. Per Drucker, the knowledge worker’s labor does not follow the linear relationship between quantity invested and returned. The elaborate nature of knowledge work makes it heavily dependent upon synergy: the right combination of talent can grow an organization by leaps and bounds, while virtually incompatible teams or partnerships can render all potential talent useless. And the human capital cost of the knowledge worker, both in their parents and the state educating them and in cost to their employers, is astronomical compared to all previous kinds of labor. In conclusion, the needs and wants of the knowledge worker must be met adequately, especially in the field of management. Management must almost undergo a revolution to adapt to this novel challenge, for the knowledge worker is the future of economic productivity in the developed world. Those employers that successfully accommodate the demands of this class of talent will eventually reign over those that do not accept that this is the direction economic productivity is headed.  References Drucker, P. F. (1991) Management Challenges for the 21st Century. Harper Business.

The Wisdom and Continuing Relevance of Peter Drucker

By Michael Cortrite Ph.D. • 07 Nov, 2024
What is wisdom? The dictionary says it is knowledge of what is true and right coupled with just judgment as to action. Jennifer Rowley reports that it is the “ability to act critically or practically in a given situation. It is based on ethical judgment related to an individual's belief system.” (Rowley 2006 p. 255). So, wisdom seems to be about deciding on or doing an action based on moral or ethical belief in helping other people. This clearly describes Peter Drucker and his often prescient ideas For the 100 th anniversary of Peter Drucker’s birth, Harvard Business Review dedicated its November 2009 magazine to Drucker. In one of the articles about Drucker by Rosabeth Moss Kanter (2009 p. 1), What Would Peter Say? Kanter posits that, Heeding Peter Drucker's wisdom might have helped us avoid—and will help us solve numerous challenges, from restoring trust in business to tackling climate change. He issued early warnings about excessive executive pay, the auto industry’s failure to adapt and innovate, competitive threats from emerging markets, and the perils of neglecting nonprofit organizations and other agents of societal reform. Meynhardt (2010) calls Drucker a towering figure in Twentieth Century management. He says no other writer has had such an impact. He is well-known to practitioners and scholars for his practical wisdom and common sense approach to management as a liberal art. Drucker believed that there is no how-to solution for management practice and education. Doing more of “this” and less of “that” and vice versa is not how Drucker suggests managers do their work. Rather, Drucker relies more on morality and the virtue of practical wisdom to solve problems related to organizations. The virtue that Drucker talks about cannot be taught. It must be experienced and self-developed over time. A good example of this is Drucker’s Management by Objectives (MBO). Drucker does not give technical advice on how to initiate MBO. Rather he wisdomizes his moral convictions that integrating personal needs for autonomy with the quest of submitting one’s efforts to a higher principle (helping people) ensures performance by converting objective needs into personal goals. (Meynhardt, 2010). Peter Drucker published thirty-eight articles in the Harvard Business Review (HBR) and seven times won the McKinsey Award presented annually to the author of the best article published during the previous year in HBR. No other person has won as many McKinsey awards as Drucker The former editor-in-chief of Harvard Business Review, Thomas A. Stewart, quotes Peter Drucker; “The few of us who talked of management forty years ago were considered more or less deranged.” Stewart says that this was essentially correct. Harvard Business Review's very mission is to improve management practice. Stewart says this mission is inconceivable without Drucker’s work. Drucker’s work in management planted ideas that are as fruitful today as they ever were. Stewart posits that each year, managers discover extraordinary and immediate relevance in articles and books that were written before they were born or even before their parents were born. Stewart (2016) tries to answer the questions: Why does Drucker’s work endure? and Why is Drucker still relevant? First, was Drucker’s talent for asking the right questions. He had an instinct for being able to not let the urgent drive out the important, for seeing the trees, not just the forest. This allowed him to calmly ask pertinent questions that encouraged clients to find the proper course to take. Secondly, Drucker was able to see whole organizations. Instead of focusing on small particular problems. Ducker had the ability to find the overarching problem as well. Stewart uses Drucker’s 1994 HBR article, The Theory of the Business to make this point. Many people were trying to analyze the problems of IBM and General Motors by looking for root causes and trying to fix the blame. Drucker, on the other hand, argued correctly that the theories and assumptions on which they had managed successfully for many years were outdated. This article is as relevant today as it was in 1994 because Drucker took the “big picture view.” And no one else has ever been so skillful at describing it. Thirdly, starting in 1934, Drucker spent two years at General Motors with the legendary Alfred P. Sloan, immersed in the workings of the automaker and learning the business from within. This allowed him to talk with authority, but he has always stayed “street smart and wise.” This mentoring helped give Drucker the gift of being able to reason inductively and deductively. He could infer a new principle or a theory from a set of data or being confronted with a particular problem; he could find the right principle to apply to solve it. Drucker’s first article published in HBR, Management Must Manage, challenged managers to learn their profession not in terms of prerogatives but in terms of their responsibilities, to assume the burden of leadership rather than the mantle of privilege. Many in the management/leadership field probably found Drucker to be “deranged,” but in 2024, this is important advice for leader (Stewart 2006). Just a few more of Drucker’s ideas that seemed well outside the mainstream when he proposed them but are standard practice today include: Managing Oneself, Privatization, Decentralization, Knowledge Workers, Management by Objectives, Charismatic Leadership Being Overrated, CEO Outsize Pay Packages, and Enthusiasm of the Work of the Salvation Army (Rees, 2014). Clearly, Drucker remains relevant! References: Kanter, R. 2009. What would Peter say? Harvard Business Review. November, 2009. Meynhardt, T. 2010. The practical wisdom of Peter Drucker: Roots in the Christian tradition. Journal of Management Development Vol. 29. No. 7/8. Rees, M. 2014 The wisdom of Peter Drucker. Wall Street Journal. Dec. 12, 2014. Rowley, J. 2006. Where is the knowledge that we have lost in knowledge? Journal of Documentation. Vol. 62, Iss. 2. 251-270. Stewart, T. 2006. Classic Drucker. Editor Thomas A. Stewart. Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation.

Revolutions in Labor Hierarchies

By Ryan Lee • 24 Oct, 2024
A specter is haunting the world – though this time, the dynamics of labor have shifted to the point where this specter cannot resemble a communist force. If Drucker’s works have been any indication, the rise of the knowledge worker is a first in the history of human productivity. This first has, among many other things, overturned the traditional labor hierarchies that have existed since the rise of agriculture. For much of history, societal hierarchies and their subsequent conflicts have been demarcated by the fine line between ruler and ruled – master and slave, lord and serf, bourgeois and proletariat, and so on. The commonality between each of these relationships has been that authority and autonomy has been largely allocated to one side – the ruling – and that the literal toil of labor has been the leverage of the other – the ruled. The rulers instructed the ruled on where to direct their labor, while the ruled prevented their rulers from siphoning too much of their earnings. Such a delicate balance, established in the first agrarian civilizations, was often upset, as shown by history’s account of countless peasant revolts and eradicated kingdoms. In his 1966 essay “The First Technological Revolution and its Consequences”, Drucker established that currently recognizable human lifestyles trace much of their origins back to this first agrarian revolution in affairs. This includes the aforementioned labor hierarchy, which has dictated government policy even into the industrial age. Even through the various industrial revolutions, the evolution of labor only affected the organization of workers, with unions and labor groups giving mass labor a platform to negotiate less violently against their employers. The base demands of labor – better wages, better working conditions – as well as the demands of their employers – more output per head, more efficiency – still belonged to the old ruler-ruled hierarchy, despite the emergence of supposedly modern fixtures of economy like the union. The rise of the knowledge worker threatens to upend this paradigm. Drucker laid out some basic facts about the knowledge worker that are relevant to dealing with this revolution. First, the knowledge worker is far more autonomous than any other kind of worker in history. Management of labor has depended on power resting largely with authority. Autonomy of the worker significantly shrinks the need for this hierarchy. Second, the knowledge worker’s output is augmented by information technology. Drucker identified this as the computer in his time, but artificial intelligence fits this role as well. In previous times, any labor-altering advancements in technology only created more jobs through economic expansion. The Luddites’ archnemesis, the textile machines dominating Britain and the United States in the early nineteenth century, created a plethora of employment through an explosion of demand for consumer goods. The assembly line that threatened the monopoly of high-cost artisans generated jobs for countless factory workers. All these phenomena were driven by the mechanization of work – repetitive work, that is. Even the replacement of the artisan was the simplification of each step of their work into a repetitive task that any unskilled laborer could replicate. However, all these technologies simply made existing manual labor more efficient by subdividing it - an early application of management theory, but one that still required mass labor regardless. The development of the computer and AI poses a distinct form of technological automation, in tandem with the rise of the knowledge worker. For the first time, true automation has become a reality. Drucker noted that the computer, and now AI, can dictate and execute decisions that before would have required a human to do. Pairing this with the autonomy of the knowledge worker, we witness the creation of a system that foregoes the historic one-way direction of command for a more reciprocative structure where workers contribute as much feedback to their institutions as their bosses and the only defining difference in authority between either is the extended foresight required to direct the entire company forward. The United States is in a mixed position to deal with this shift in hierarchy. Historically, it has prescribed all its citizens to be equal and free, however different reality may have been. Individual liberty has been baked into the country’s persona beginning with the Founding Fathers and spanning the defining moments of American history, from the Civil War to the Frontier Thesis of 1890 to the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Thus, the American psyche is better adjusted to welcome the knowledge worker; the view that an American peasant never existed doesn’t exist for nothing. However, other contradictions, such as the centuries-long establishment of slavery and the historic disenfranchisement of particular groups within the United States, will contribute to friction in the transition. If not for being at direct odds with the loosening of hierarchy, these facts will at the very least create tension for the many facets of American society left behind in the deepening dependency on knowledge workers, as has recently been observed with the rise of populism on both wings of the American political spectrum. Drucker was receptive to such potential reverberations, evidenced by his concerns expressed in his work “The New Productivity Challenge” (1991). He acknowledged that however much of a role knowledge and higher service work would contribute to the American economy, the majority of the population would inevitably be outside this ecosystem, especially given the lack of concentrated education and training available to them. In that particular work he proposed that increases in productivity were crucial in maintaining the economic prosperity to generate the social stability that had prevented the oft-violent revolutions of the past. In consideration of the aforementioned hierarchical shift brought to light, the relationships between employer and employee within management theory are also important in defusing any grievances the denied populace has towards their exclusion from high-concentration work. Although service work has progressed in “employee feedback” since the mid 20th century, dissent among lower-paid service workers has risen, leading to unionization conflicts like those at Amazon and Starbucks as well as large waves of “quiet quitting” that came right after the Covid-19 pandemic. Given the prevalence of phenomena like these, management theory should heed Drucker’s warnings in advance and evaluate existing practices in employer-employee hierarchies, not only in the knowledge-worker field but in the wider service worker field as well. For if neglected, this issue shall likely boil over and erupt just as the Revolutions of 1848 manifested the specter of the labor crises sweeping Europe. As the modern maxim goes, institutions must truly adapt to having their employees “be their own boss” more than before, for the benefit of employer, employee, society, and the economy.  References Drucker, P. F. (1966) The First Technological Revolution and its Consequences. Johns Hopkins University Press. Drucker, P.F. (1991) The New Productivity Challenge. Harvard Business Review.
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