We owe a great deal of gratitude to Bruce Rosenstein. For some time now, he has dedicated his professional life to extending Peter Drucker’s immense legacy through continued (re)interpretation and collaboration with other management experts – most recently manifested in a second book, Create Your Future the Peter Drucker Way (2013). Bruce’s dedication keeps Peter Drucker’s work alive and relevant.
On 15 January 2014, University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management brought us a lecture by Bruce in the Getting it Done Experts Speaker Series.
Bruce focused the talk on the concepts and themes in his latest book, explaining the essential difference between an attitude of “the future is unknowable and we can only hope for the best” on the one hand and an attitude of “the future is a mindset and we can have a hand in creating it by understanding it” on the other hand. Bruce calls it being the authors of, not the audience for, the future.
Key points emphasized by Bruce included the necessity of maintaining a global world view and staying aware of developments everywhere across the globe (that’s what Peter Drucker did); remaining relevant (that’s what Peter Drucker still is); and focusing on benefiting others (that was a Peter Drucker principle). They added up to a fundamental message that “current success is not enough … we must organize our future actively.”
I came away inspired by two essential questions:
One was familiar as I am constantly asking it: If the current [organization, association, work flow, priority allocation, …] did not exist, would you invent it now? In other words, the presence of a certain entity, product, or process today is not necessarily a justification for its
future presence. What worked well up to now may not continue to work well. Be ready, as Bruce says in his book, to “remove and improve.” No doubt we have all observed in many contexts how a profound fear of change brings about consequences quite opposite to what the fear of change was supposed to protect.
The second was less familiar, but it certainly resonated as I thought of all the inspiration my colleagues in other professions have provided over the years:
Are you making sure to expose yourself to people NOT in your own industry?
Bruce described how Peter Drucker’s work – for corporations, unions, nonprofits, and so on – made him “un-pigeonholeable”: Seeing so many facets of society and its organizations, Peter Drucker understood all manner of diverse environments and distilled from them his timeless advice. It could never be said that his wisdom and views were colored by any one environment. In addition, Bruce stressed the value of having a life outside work – as Peter Drucker certainly did, shown by his interest in Zen art – so as to give creativity and innovation a chance to derive nourishment from a vast range of sources.
Information professionals can only benefit from developing their own answers to these two questions Why not post them prominently for all to see in the workplace?
—Ulla de Stricker
Original blog post can be found at http://www.destricker.com/other/the-drucker-way-future-bruce-rosenstein/