Issue No. 97 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting urges you to read or re-read one book a year by Peter Drucker. Affirm your team at your staff meeting this week with Drucker’s reminder that “strong people always have strong weaknesses too. Where there are peaks, there are valleys. And no one is strong in many areas.” It takes a village! And this reminder, check out my Management Buckets website with dozens of resources and downloadable worksheets for your staff meetings.
The Besetting Sin of Leaders
“Don’t be afraid of strengths in your organization,” writes Peter Drucker. “This is the besetting sin of people who run organizations. Of course, able people are ambitious. But you run far less risk of having able people around who want to push you out than you risk by being served by mediocrity.”
Wow! The wisdom still oozes from Drucker’s 1990 book on nonprofit management. Many leaders re-read at least one Drucker book a year. If you lead a nonprofit, this week’s pick is a good place to start. It includes five major sections: 1) The Mission Comes First: and your role as a leader; 2) From Mission to Performance: effective strategies for marketing, innovation and fund development; 3) Managing for Performance: how to define it; how to measure it; 4) People and Relationships: your staff, your board, your volunteers, your community; and 5) Developing Yourself: as a person, as an executive, as a leader.
Drucker’s interview with Max De Pree is worth the price of the book. De Pree says, “The first duty of a leader is to define reality. Every organization, in order to be healthy, to have renewal processes, to survive, has to be in touch with reality.” The book includes five additional interviews with Frances Hesselbein (goals), Philip Kotler (defining the market), Albert Shanker (accountability), David Hubbard (boards) and Roxanne Spitzer-Lehmann (the woman executive).
To order this book from Amazon, click on the title: Managing the Nonprofit Organization: Principles and Practices. It’s as relevant today as it was in 1990. As Bob Buford reminded us in the foreword to my book, Drucker said, “The purpose of management is not to make the Church more businesslike, but more Church-like.”
Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:
1. Max De Pree said, “The first duty of a leader is to define reality.” How good are we at defining reality?
2. If we’re not good at it, how could we better look in the mirror—and then do something about the reality we’re facing?
Practice, Practice, Practice the Art of Management - Insights from Mastering the Management Buckets: 20 Critical Competencies for Leading Your Business or Nonprofit
A colleague told me he’s added copies of Mastering the Management Buckets to his lunchroom leadership library. Do this and it becomes a daily reminder from chapter four, The Drucker Bucket, and Peter Drucker’s admonition to “practice, practice, practice the art of management.”
Ball No. 3 in the Drucker Bucket reads, “Read or re-read one Drucker book each year. The father of modern management knows best.”
Summer is a great time to re-visit great books, including any book written by Peter Drucker, the father of modern management. There’s a list of Drucker’s books on pages 73-75 in my book, or click here to download the list from the Management Buckets website. Today’s book, Managing the Nonprofit Organization: Principles and Practices, is worth reading every year.
In discussing common mistakes in his winning strategies chapter, Drucker writes, “But also don’t go by what ‘everybody knows’ instead of looking out the window. What everybody knows is usually twenty years out of date. In political campaigns, the ones who look so promising at the beginning and then fizzle out are usually the ones who go by what they believe everybody knows. They haven’t tested it, and it turns out that ‘This was twenty years ago.’”
FALL 2008 WORKSHOP DATES. Join your colleagues at one of our Buckets or Board workshops this fall:
Mastering the Management Buckets Workshop Experience
September 16-17, 2008 (Colorado Springs)
October 14-15, 2008 (Chicago)
November 18-19, 2008 (Orange County, Calif.)
Nonprofit Board Governance Workshop
September 18, 2008 (Colorado Springs)
October 13, 2008 (Chicago)
November 21, 2008 (Orange County, Calif.)
For more details and to download the workshop brochures, visit The Workshop page on the Management Buckets website.
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