Management as a Liberal Art Research Institute

Trumpism, the Recent Riots, and the Way Back to a Healthy Society

Karen E. Linkletter, Ph.D.

PUBLISHED:

January 8, 2021

The old orders have broken down, and no new order can be contrived from the old foundations. The alternative is chaos; and in despair, the masses turn to the magician who promises to make the impossible possible…For if you are caught between the flood of the past, through which you cannot retrace your steps, and an apparently unscalable blank wall in front of you, it is only by magic and miracles that you can hope to escape.
— Peter F. Drucker, The End of Economic Man


On January 6, as Congress convened to recognize the results of the November election, Americans watched in horror as a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol. During the “Save America” rally in Washington D.C., Trump encouraged the crowd to march to the Capitol, telling them that “We will never give up. We will never concede. It will never happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved. Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore.” After the subsequent riot, 83 were arrested, five people were killed, including a police officer, and 50 police officers were injured. Images of people in MAGA gear breaking windows, trashing congressional offices, and stealing podiums from the senate floor engendered a collective response of disgust, shame, and disbelief. Is this what America has become?


In the days and weeks that follow, the nation will have to come to terms with what this paroxysm truly represents. Yes, there will be questions about events and details. Why was law enforcement so overwhelmed, when they knew about the “Save America” rally well in advance? Why was the police response to those violating the Capitol perimeter so mild, particularly when compared with the law enforcement response to the June 2020 Black Lives Matter protest in Lafayette Park, where police used batons, tear gas, horses, a helicopter, and well over 5000 National Guard troops to disperse the peaceful protestors. How complicit are Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms in promoting conspiracy theories that have fueled the deep divisions in this country?


But more importantly, we come to the question of leadership. Drucker’s management theories derive from his concept of a functioning society. In times of great change, particularly social upheaval, people need to hold on to some stability, retaining some institutions in which they can have faith, while others are experiencing rapid change. This balance between continuity and discontinuity drove much of Drucker’s work — both his writing on business and his social analyses. Innovation within an organization needs to be systematic, not haphazard and overly disruptive. Social and economic change is inevitable, but institutions cannot simply be thrown out wholesale. Leaders, therefore, are responsible for helping people through inevitable times of change, whether they lead companies or countries. As Drucker said, “Leadership is a foul-weather job.”


Which leads us to Drucker’s quote from his 1939 book, The End of Economic Man. Drucker, like many who escaped Nazi Germany, was attempting to come to grips with the reality of totalitarianism and its origins. What happened, and why? Drucker’s thesis is sophisticated, but one of the key components he identifies is a complete lack of hope combined by a failure of all social institutions. If there is nothing left of the past, the foundation of your society, you have nothing left to hold on to. If there is no hope in the future — merely an “unscalable blank wall in front of you” — then you have nowhere to go. Given this scenario, Drucker posits, people will look for “magic and miracles.” In Germany and Italy of the 1930s, that was fascism.


In the United States, Trumpism has become the “magic and miracles” that disaffected America has turned to. The post-mortems of the 2016 election are too many to count, but it is clear that much of what drove Trump’s support was a deep distrust of elites, particularly political elites, in American society. Trump’s promise to “drain the swamp” was aimed directly at this distrust. As increasingly educated women and minorities gained ground in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, uneducated American workers began to fall farther and farther behind. Rapid technological change and economic recession accelerated the job losses in manufacturing that had begun earlier, so the economic future for those without a college education was bleak indeed. Barack Obama modeled the achievement of a Harvard education and sharp legal mind, and an eye towards the future and progress. Trump’s appeal was not policy, but his promise to “make the impossible possible.” He would turn back the clock and bring back an America that no longer existed. However, this didn’t mean returning America to its values and shoring up its beloved institutions. That meant breaking down all of the norms and inherited history. Of course, this wouldn’t bring back jobs in coal mines. But it made people feel good because it gave them a way out of an impossible situation. One that made them feel really, really bad about themselves. By making enemies of the educated elite, of minorities, of the very democratic institutions this country was founded on, those alienated by a rapidly changing world could hold on to some chance to escape. Even if that meant burning down the house on the way out.


All this is to say that Drucker, as a social ecologist, would have seen this all coming. Trump repeatedly, on social media and during his rallies, undermined the 2020 election (even before the election itself, claiming that the only way he would lose would be if the election was rigged). After all, Trump is a charismatic leader, and Drucker greatly feared that leadership style. He said that leadership has very little to do with charisma. Rather, “It is mundane, unromantic, and boring. Its essence is performance.” Leadership, in the Drucker sense, would have prevented this entire situation. A true leader would never have exhorted his followers in Washington D.C. to “show strength” and “fight” when they marched to the Capitol, which was filled with elected officials doing the people’s business. A true leader would have told the truth. We lost. We fought hard, but now is the time to respect the institutions of democracy. But this leader has repeatedly undermined those very institutions. So, it is not surprising to see this ultimate trashing of the buildings that epitomize our representative democracy.


We have other leadership to hold accountable for this. The Republican leadership who has looked the other way — until now. Mitch McConnell, Lindsay Graham and others seem to have finally decided that this is not the kind of leadership they want to be associated with. 140 Republicans in the House of Representatives still chose not to recognize the results of the election, even after the melee in the Capitol on January 6. The business community supported this administration — until now. The National Association of Manufacturers, Business Roundtable, and U.S. Chamber of Commerce are backpedaling away from Trump. If, as Drucker says, leadership is about trust, ethics, and modeling right behavior, then these “leaders” should long ago have distanced themselves from a charismatic leader who failed to truly lead. Instead, these Republican and business leaders chose to close their eyes to the true nature of Trumpism, and instead only looked at policy (or their fear of losing their jobs). But Trumpism isn’t about policy. It’s about a magician making promises.


How do we move forward? First and foremost, we must restore faith in our institutions of democracy. Drucker’s functioning society can only work if we have that. The Biden administration has an unfathomable amount of work ahead of it. If we have a significant percentage of our population who really believes that our democratic institutions and processes are broken, we cannot function as a society. It does not matter if businesses thrive. It does not matter if kids are in school. The first thing we must do is make sure that we still have a functioning democratic society. We somehow must work to convince those who believe in the magician that they are still part of a society that includes them. And that is a real challenge, given what we saw this week.


Yes, America. This is what we have become. But we can change it. Together.

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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