Week 14 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. (Subscribe on this page.) Kevin East is our guest writer today.
Week 14: Control by Mission and Strategy, Not Hierarchy
THE BIG IDEA FROM THE BOOK: As the title of the chapter suggests, Drucker describes the effectiveness of corporations that are excelling in their specific industries by providing leadership that controls by mission and strategy, not by hierarchical authority.
KEVIN EAST’S FAVORITE DRUCKER INSIGHTS from Week 14, pages 111-117:
• “We are increasingly moving towards multinational, transnational organizations that are held together by two factors: Control of mission and strategy [as opposed to hierarchical control], and enough people who know and trust each other.”
• “The CEO of tomorrow will have to understand when to command and when to partner.”
• “As the corporation moves towards a confederation or a syndicate, it will increasingly need a top management that is separate, powerful, and accountable.”
KEVIN EAST’S COLOR COMMENTARY:
Confession time: I am a control freak. The problem is, now that I am the leader of a ministry, I have great people that provide just as much solid experience and ideas that I do. That’s a good problem to have.
So I—and possibly you—have a daily choice to make: we can either seek to control our people to do things exactly the way we would want them done, or we can lead by keeping people focused on the mission and strategy of the organization.
This is the issue Drucker describes in great detail of corporations that operate at a multinational level.
I don’t know about you, but I’d love to provide leadership that Drucker describes as being where “burdensome command and control features are mostly absent.”
THIS WEEK’S QUOTES & COMMENTARY BY KEVIN EAST:
Kevin East is the President of The Mentoring Alliance in Tyler, Texas. He has the best wife on the planet, five amazing kids—two of which came by adoption—and a dog he doesn’t much care for. Stop by his blog, Following to Lead, where he writes on issues pertaining to family, adoption and leadership.
TO-DO TODAY:
• If you have subsidiaries, departments, units, or partners in other neighborhoods, cities, regions, or countries—take a page from this chapter and Skype about it.
• Ask your people: could we bless a “Coca-Cola Argentina” scenario (page 113)—or would it drive us nuts?
NEXT MONDAY:
On April 13, 2015, Dan Busby will continue this four-week segment on “Management in a Pluralistic Society of Organizations” with Week 15’s topic, “Sustaining the Spirit of an Organization."
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