Week 4 of 52. Welcome to Drucker Mondays, a 52-week journey through the new book, A Year with Peter Drucker: 52 Weeks of Coaching for Leadership Effectiveness, by Joseph A. Maciariello. Each Monday, we'll feature a Drucker fan and his or her favorite snippet from the week's topic. Click here to subscribe. David Schmidt is our guest writer this week.
Week 4: “Education and Management: Keys to Economic Development”
THE BIG IDEA FROM THE BOOK: Lifelong learning raises the educational and managerial competencies of people, including ourselves. Rising competencies create “wealth” of all kinds.
DAVID SCHMIDT’S FAVORITE DRUCKER INSIGHTS from Week 4, pages 25-33:
• “It is more effective to allocate resources to educate leaders and would-be leaders in developing countries than it is to provide financial aid.”
• With the exception of Indonesia, “Islam has been an economic development failure.” (Drucker made this comment in 2002—just eight years before the “Arab Spring” and widespread economic and political unrest began across the Arab world.)
DAVID SCHMIDT’S COLOR COMMENTARY:
Peter Drucker’s bracing quotes above challenge us to think differently about how we invest in ourselves, and people near and far. He saw the value of lifelong learning—“a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change.” Whether on a personal, local or global level, education and developing managerial competencies are worthy investments.
A current client, motivated by compassion and wanting to apply Drucker’s thinking here, recently introduced a monthly “lunch and learn” for support staff (not just leaders) using the Global Leadership Summit Team Edition videos. This isn’t rocket science. You have to care about developing the competencies of everyone on the team.
THIS WEEK’S QUOTES & COMMENTARY BY:
J. David Schmidt is the president of J. David Schmidt & Associates, Wheaton, Ill. He notes, “I never met Peter Drucker, but I have met people who applied what they learned from him. And I am better for it.”
TO-DO TODAY:
[ ] Stop: Focusing on your own learning, solely. And stop thinking that every time you do a Google search, read a Tweet or attend a Christian conference that you are “keeping abreast of change.”
[ ] Start: Asking a couple of people who know you, to what extent they see you as a lifelong learner. Act on what you hear. Take a step away from being an information sponge to learning something that deepens you. Find new people from whom you can learn something new. Consider people younger than yourself as a learning resource.
[ ] Continue: To keep learning—if you are a lifelong learner. Ask co-workers to join you. Identify one person younger than yourself to join in the journey of lifelong learning.
NEXT MONDAY:
Feb. 2, 2015 – Week 5: “Management Rooted in the Nature of Reality.” Watch for the color commentary and learn what book Drucker named “the best book on leadership.”
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