Management as a Liberal Art Research Institute

Meaning, Happiness, and Peace

Michael Cortrite Ph.D.

PUBLISHED:

September 16, 2024

There seems to be a general misconception about the famous phrase from the United States Declaration of Independence; “Life. Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Jeffrey Rosen (2024),  in his book The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America emphasizes that the founding fathers of America were deeply  influenced by classical writers who advocated for a life of virtue as the pathway to true happiness. Rosen argues that the pursuit of happiness was not meant to be about accumulating 

wealth or achieving fame, but about living a life of purpose, guided by the intrinsic rewards of  virtue and service to others. These classical ideals, which shaped the very foundation of American society continues to resonate today, particularly in the context of grassroots movements that seek to promote peace, justice, and the common good.


According to Moss (2017), the biggest misconception of the happiness industry is that happiness is an end, not a means. We think that if we get what we want, then we’ll be happy. We tend to see “being happy” as the end goal. But it turns out that what’s really important is the journey. Another misconception about happiness is that happiness is being cheerful, joyous, and content all the time—always having a smile on your face. It is not. Being happy and leading a rich life is about taking the good with the bad and learning how to reframe the bad.


One of the paradoxes of being human is that while it may make sense for us to pamper and pleasure ourselves because we tend to think that this will make us happy, the reality is that the key to living a meaningful and fulfilled/happy life is caring for and helping other people. Some would say that caring more about other people’s needs than our own is the key to a more peaceful world.


According to Peter Drucker, the father of modern management, no society can properly function unless it gives the individual member social status, function, meaning, and dignity and unless the decisive social power is legitimate power. If the individual is not given these things there can be no society but only a mass of social atoms flying through space without aim or purpose (Drucker Institute).


Toubiana and Yair (2012) state, “It is frustratingly difficult to cite a significant modern management concept that was not first articulated, if not invented by Peter Drucker.” Drucker was born in Austria and was in his early 20s when he witnessed Adolph Hitler and the Nazis taking control of Germany. This event, along with publishing his first of 39 books in 1939, The End of Economic Man: The Origins of Totalitarianism, set his lifelong goal of a peaceful world. Drucker was determined that fascism, totalitarianism, and autocracy could be eliminated by making sure that societies’ function is to give all people’s lives meaning and status. Without status and function, people could allow autocracy and totalitarianism (Drucker Institute).


Drucker (1995 p.29-30) thinks that all people need to have meaning. He said:


For the individual without function and status, society is irrational, incalculable, and shapeless. The “rootless” individual, the outcast—for the absence of social function and status casts a man from the society of his fellows—sees no society. He sees only demonic forces, half sensible, half meaningless, half in light, and half in darkness, but never predictable. They decide about his livelihood without the possibility of his understanding them. He is like a blindfolded man in a strange room, playing a game of which he does not know the rules; and the prize at stake is his own happiness, his own livelihood, and even his own life.

           

A man in such a state probably has little chance of being fulfilled, rational, or peaceful. There are many reasons for a loss of meaning, status, or function, but one of the most obvious and easiest to understand is unemployment. Not only is unemployment a potential economic catastrophe, but it also entails social disenfranchisement. Prolonged unemployment can lead to the loss of self-respect, which has nothing to do with the person's actions (Maciariello and Linkletter 2011). 


In her book The Power of Meaning (2017), Emily Esfahani Smith says that many people spend their lives pursuing happiness and eventually end up asking, “Is this all there is?” Smith says that to have a fulfilling life, one needs meaning in their life. Meaning comes from belonging to and serving something beyond yourself and developing the best within yourself. Creating meaning in your life requires some degree of selflessness (Seligman 2002). Smith cites studies that show people who have meaning in their lives are more resilient, do better in school and work, and live longer. She refers to the four pillars of a meaningful life. They are belonging, purpose, transcendence, and story-telling. 


Belonging (bonds to family and friends) means being in relationships where you are intrinsically valued for who you are. Some groups, such as gangs or cults, value people for what they believe or who they hate, not for who they are. 


Purpose is less about what you want than about what you give. It gives you something worthwhile to live for. A classic example would be raising children. For some people, their work gives them purpose. The important thing is to contribute and feel needed. What John Bunyan said about meaning and purpose should be kept in mind; “You have not lived today until you have done something for someone who can never repay you.” (Bunyan 2020).


Transcendence is stepping beyond yourself; you get lost in a meaningful task, your sense of self fades away, and you are less self-centered. Transcendence can result in a person being more generous when helping people.


Storytelling is the story you tell yourself about yourself. It gives people clarity about themselves and helps them understand how they became themselves. A person’s story can change because their lives evolve however they are still constrained by the facts.


Too many people today have made the mistake of anointing a job as their main source of meaning. Seventy percent of employees say their jobs define them. Meanwhile, Gallup data shows that only 12.5 percent of us are “totally and utterly engaged” at work. (Wellman 2024)


Victor Frankel had much to say about meaning in his book, Man’s Search for Meaning. He was a psychiatrist, born in Austria, and was a prisoner in some of the Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust. He used his psychiatrist training to observe what was happening to himself and the other prisoners. One of his observations was that paradoxically, prisoners who shared their last scrap of bread with a prisoner who looked like they needed it tended to live longer than those who stole and ate other prisoners' last scrap of bread. One would think the prisoner who got more to eat because of stealing others’ bread would live longer. But Frankl realized that the prisoners who help others by sharing their food had a reason to live—to help others. They had higher self-esteem than the prisoners who stole from others. They had meaning in their lives. They had a purpose to live. Frankl often used the Nietzsche quote, “He who has a why to live, can bear with almost any how.” Frankl saw what he termed the last of human freedoms, the freedom to choose one’s attitude in any circumstances.


Frankl wrote Man’s Search for Meaning after the Holocaust and created a new psychiatrist discipline, Logotherapy, which is still widely used today. He contends, "The more one aims for success and makes it a target, the more you will miss it. For happiness, like success, it cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as a by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself.” In other words, Frankel emphasizes selflessness, which is a prerequisite to having meaning in your life, such as giving time and (or) valuables to help others.


In a TED Talk titled “It’s Time to Reclaim Religion,” Rabbi Sharon Brous tells us that “Our World is on Fire.” The world is divided because of extremism. Religions and other institutions can continue to increase divisiveness, or they can oppose extremism in all its forms to stop wars, oppression, radical individualism, and discrimination. If people, instead of being apathetic, told themselves, I can do something, we could live in a more peaceful, loving, and just world that values peace and dignity for all.


The Warren Berger (2018) book, The Book of Beautiful Questions, has a great quote to get people communicating, “What if I replace judgment with curiosity?” P.124. He posits that if people would only understand that just because someone knows that he or she is right, they may or may not be. If there is a disagreement about who is “right,” both sides could avoid an altercation if they ask the “other” person to explain their reasoning for their position because they are genuinely curious. And, of course, the person expressing their curiosity needs to be willing to listen and be willing to change their position if need be. (Berger 2018)


Joshua Becker (2022) says that one of the reasons for living a meaningful life is so that when you get to the end of your life, you are at peace with more satisfaction and less regret and guilt over how you spent your life. Also, a person living a meaningful life is peace-loving and promotes peace in others.


Joshua Becker (p. 157), posits that. fame, wealth, and power are not things to strive for in lieu of living a meaningful life. There are some things worth becoming famous for that can make a life more meaningful: kindness, perseverance, faithfulness, empathy, joy, encouragement, peacemaking, and loving. 

 

REFERENCES:


Becker, J. (2022) Things that matter: Overcoming distraction to pursue a more meaningful life. Penguin Random House WaterBrook.


Berger, W. (2018 The book of beautiful questions. Bloomsbury Publishing. (2018).


Brous, S. (2017). It’s time to reclaim religion. TED talk. https://www.ted.com/talks/sharon_brous_it_s_time_to_reclaim_religion


Bunyan, J. Updated by Vermilye, A. (2020) Pilgrim’s Progress. Brown Chair Books.


Drucker Institute 1999. Claremont Graduate Institute.  https://drucker.institute/about/drucker-archives/


Drucker, P. (1995) The future of industrial man. Routledge.


Frankl, V. (1959) Man’s search for meaning: An introduction to Logotherapy. Beacon Press.


Maciariello, J. Linkletter, K. (2011) Drucker’s lost art of management: Peter Drucker’s timeless vision for building effective organizations. McGraw-Hill.

 

Moss, J. (2017). Happiness Isn’t the absence of negative feelings. In Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation (Ed). Emotional Intelligence: Happiness.


Rosen, J. 2024. The pursuit of happiness: How classical writers on virtue inspired the lives of the founders and defined America. Simon & Schuster.


Seligman, M. (2002) Authentic happiness: Using the new positive psychology to realize your potential for lasting fulfillment. Simon & Schuster.


Toubiana, M. Yair, G. (2101) The salvation of meaning in Peter Drucker’s oeuvre. Journal of Management History. Vol. 18. Iss. 2. 178-199.


Wellman, J. (2024) You only die once: How to make it to the end with no regrets. Voracious.

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

The Specifics of Management of the Knowledge Worker

By Ryan Lee • November 7, 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. • November 7, 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.
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