Management as a Liberal Art Research Institute

Interview with Bruce Rosenstein

Robert Kirkland, Ph.D.

PUBLISHED:

April 12, 2022

As a leader, how are you taking care of your next 100 days?


In the age of the Great Resignation, there’s a new set of rules.


How do leaders today deal with changes that happen faster, and more profoundly, than ever before? Where does your organization fit within our ever-changing workplace?


You’re concerned about where you stand, and what to do next as a manager. We get it. But there's good news. Peter Drucker’s foundational philosophies answer many of these questions.

Bruce Rosenstein


Drucker's concepts have withstood the test of time. And by putting his principles into action, managers can not only withstand the ever-changing business landscape but thrive within that change.


In a post-pandemic society, many of the rules that existed before no longer hold true. We are in the new age of the Great Resignation. Jack Kelly with Forbes coined the term, as 'a sort of workers’ revolution and uprising against bad bosses and tone-deaf companies.'


With a worker mass exodus on our hands, learning and adapting to changing societal needs is more important today than ever before.


The changing times bring new relevance to Peter Drucker’s concept of Management as a Liberal Art (MLA). Bruce Rosenstein – Managing Editor of Leader to Leader and author of Create Your Future the Peter Drucker Way – helps us explore Drucker’s concepts in the modern era. How best to apply them to help your organization – and leadership style – adapt to the new rules.


So what does viewing MLA mean?


Peter Drucker left it open to some interpretation. But for Rosenstein, Drucker’s concept centers around lifelong learning. He stresses the importance of learning both as an organization and as an individual. Applying new knowledge is the key to embracing change. Not fighting it. After all, there is no way to halt change, so we must adapt to it.


“Drucker said that unless the manager takes care of the next 100 days, there will be no next 100 years.” – Bruce Rosenstein


So how do you take care of your next 100 days?


Here’s what to do daily:


1. Learn something new

All learning counts. In the era of micro-credentials, it is not necessary to go out and get another four-year degree. But you can, and should, find daily ways to expand your access to high-quality information. As a leader this is imperative.


Ask yourself – What new information can I take in and then apply to my business?


2. Focus on the idea of meaning & purpose in work

People want to find meaning in their work no matter what it is they do. This is the nature of why people work. To be a part of a larger whole.


Ask yourself – How do I continue to help people find this meaning through both what our company does, and what I do as a leader?


3. Go beyond your four walls

To stay relevant, you must go beyond your four walls. These walls used to be literal. A physical office. But for many of us, we no longer have a physical office or a daily commute. It is necessary to re-set this boundary even if it is no longer a physical one.


As Bruce Rosenstein reminds us, we lose the big picture when we get too wrapped up in what we are doing. So get out, beyond those four walls and see how it inspires you as a leader.


Ask yourself – How can my part in the outside world help me discover how my organization can remain relevant now, and in the next 100 days?


Peter Drucker always saw the connection the workplace had on society and vice versa. Living in more than one world is vital on both a personal and professional level. Having other spheres of interest beyond work is vital.


Just a few short years ago, we managed our lives around our work. Now, many of us are managing work around our lives. This is an important distinction.


If you're finding resistance to this new reality, lean on Peter Drucker’s vision, that a functioning society asks us to see management and organizations as a part of the whole.


Take part in social interests. You are not neglecting work, you are contributing to its growth.


It will all come back to how you can better yourself around work. And when you are a better manager, you better your employees and your organization.


As the whole changes, so must your daily actions as an individual, and as an organization. Who are we as people and where do we fit into organizations? How do we fit into our communities and society? How does your organization fit?


Both Rosenstein and Drucker understand the importance of asking yourself these daily questions. Learn a little bit every day and put that new knowledge into action.


This is how we regain perspective and find where our historical moment fits in. And perhaps most importantly, how you will contribute to this moment of change.


Sources:


A Tribute to Charles Handy (1932-2024)

By Karen Linkletter Ph.D. • January 6, 2025
On December 13, 2024, we lost a seminal management philosopher and theorist: Charles Handy. Like Peter Drucker, Handy was a social thinker and management theorist who emphasized the human side of work as more important than profits and valued individual growth and development in organizations. Handy was born in Ireland and studied at Oxford. In 1956, he went to work for Shell, working in Borneo, where he met his future wife, Elizabeth Hill. Disillusioned by corporate life, Handy left Shell in 1962 to study management at MIT in their executive program. Inspired by their humanistic approach, he returned to London in 1967 to start the London Business School. Handy knew Drucker and was a regular keynote speaker at the Global Drucker Forum in Vienna. The two men had much in common in terms of their approaches to management and social theory. Like Drucker, Handy became an author (although, unlike Drucker, Handy was a corporate executive before he turned to writing). Handy wrote not just on business but also society, serving as much as a social ecologist as Drucker was. In his pivotal book, The Age of Unreason (1989), Handy argued for the disruption of discontinuity – resulting in a new world of business, education, and work that was highly unpredictable. He rejected shareholder capitalism and saw the organization as a place for human purpose and fulfillment, based on trust. Like Drucker, Handy advocated federalism in organizations, disseminating authority and responsibility to the lowest possible levels. He also saw “the future that had already happened.” Handy coined the term “portfolio life,” where knowledge workers would increasingly work remotely and for multiple organizations. In the 1980s, he posited that society consisted of “shamrock organizations”: those that had three integrated leaves: full-time employees, outside contractors, and temporary workers. Handy thus foresaw the new “gig economy” and increasingly autonomy of knowledge work. Finally, like Drucker, Handy had a life partner who not only supported his career but was an independent woman with her own interests. Liz Handy, like Doris Drucker, was an entrepreneur who ran an interior design business, and later was a professional photographer and Charles’s business agent.  Minglo Shao, founder of CIAM, remembers Handy as a warm man who made several important contributions to what we see as the fundamentals of Management as a Liberal Art. We are thankful for Handy’s contributions to management theory and social thought, and for his legacy at the Global Drucker Forum in the form of the Charles and Elizabeth Handy Lecture Series.

Treasures from the Charles Handy Drucker Forum legacy

By Richard and Ilse Straub with the Drucker Forum Team • December 29, 2024
For 15 years, Charles Handy did us the enormous honor of choosing the Drucker Forum as a privileged platform for delivering his message to the world, and particularly to the younger generation in which he had such faith. Following up on our initial announcement of Charles’ passing Charles Handy (1932–2024) , we are honored to share a selection of his key contributions to the Forum with our wider community. Charles’ brilliant keynotes at the Drucker Forum have become legendary. Normally accessible only to members of the Drucker Society, from today they are available as recordings to the wider public for a period of 30 days. At the first centennial Forum in 2009, Charles talked about his debt to Peter Drucker while outlining his own fundamental management concepts that he had developed over the years. Two years later, he touched on the ideas of Adam Smith and demonstrated how much more to them there was than the celebrated “invisible hand” of self-interest. In his landmark closing address in 2017, pursuing a thread developed in his 2015 book The Second Curve, he called for a management reformation that would turn it into a tool for the common good – thus drawing the first contours of what we would announce six years later as the Next Management . We took to heart his exhortation not to wait for great leaders but “to start small fires in the darkness, until they spread and the whole world is alight with a better vision of what we could do with our businesses”. Management’s "second curve" will be the focus of the “Charles and Elizabeth Handy Lecture Series” in 2025. Following the loss of his beloved wife Elizabeth in 2018 and a severe stroke, Charles was much reduced in mobility in his last years – but not in his determination to continue spreading his message of hope to the world. He couldn’t participate in person in the Drucker Forum 2022, but he participated in a moving online interview with his son Scott, who directed young actors in a short performance of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot by Beckett to illustrate some points.  Charles also contributed valued digital articles for our blog and for Drucker Forum partners. Even during the most difficult period of his life he continued to write and develop his ideas in weekly columns for the Idler magazine. This entailed first memorizing the article, then dictating it and finally reviewing it by having someone it re-read to him – a remarkable feat of memory and determination. The article is a jewel and most appropriate for Christmas and the season of self-reflection. Have a wonderful Christmas, happy holidays and a healthy and prosperous New Year.

The Future of Knowledge Work: What Drucker can teach us

By Karen Linkletter Ph.D. • November 19, 2024
Interview with Karen Linkletter at the 16th Global Peter Drucker Forum 2024  Video Interview
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