CONCLUSION
The Evolving Business of Business

Few scholars have contributed more to business theory than Peter F. Drucker, the Austrian-born management consultant who turned the eye of a social scientist onto America’s favorite pastime—business. Business drives the engine of our progress and has for more than a century.

With the publication of The Effective Executive in 1967, Drucker codified the basics of modern business productivity. He put into print the best of the strategies businesses had invented in the twentieth century to adapt to constantly shifting technological and social change.

The Effective Executive has remained in print and constant use since its publication almost fifty years ago, and rightly so. Few business references have served us half as well. But half a century is a geological era in business terms, and though Drucker updated his book through multiple editions, it’s a bit dated these days. Since his day, women have entered the business field in unprecedented numbers, our world recently survived the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, and business technology has sprung far ahead of what even the most optimistic prophets predicted.

That’s why I wanted to expand on Drucker’s basic themes for the modern business arena. By no means do I intend to even attempt to unseat Drucker or imitate his work in any way; I just seek to supplement. My chapters don’t map one-to-one with Drucker’s, and there are almost twice as many. But I sought to bring many themes up to speed for the modern business era, where flexibility, agility, and on-the-spot, in-the-moment execution rule. On the website associated with this book, www.3TLeadership.com, I’ve included a personal journal, book club materials, and other resources to help you connect the dots between this volume and your own work.

These days, it’s not enough for an executive to do the right things; he or she has to be superbly efficient, too. As executives, we must manage this intersection of efficiency and effectiveness carefully to ensure we do the right things right, wasting as little time as possible in the process.

We can no longer lock ourselves into a long-term plan of action; things change far too quickly for that to work. Even the most traditional corporations have set that concept aside in favor of dynamic, on-the-spot adaptation to the confusing modern business environment.

THE EVOLUTION TOWARD COMMON GROUND

Perhaps the greatest change we’ve seen while boldly going deeper into the Information Era is that the roles of manager and worker have evolved toward each other. These roles are no longer as strictly defined on either side of the equation, and the continuum between them is just that—a continuum, a smooth change from pure worker on one end to pure leader on the other.

This hasn’t always been the case. Once upon a time, management was management, workers were workers, and never the twain met. Leadership was about autocracy, and workers weren’t paid to think. Sure, a few stood on the rungs in between (like foremen). But even they remained workers, their roles well defined.

Today, an executive is anyone who executes strategy—from individual contributors through low-level management all the way to the C-Suite. The old roles have become blurry; one does what one has to, in the moment, to get things done. True managers lead these days by facilitating: that is, by making life easier for the rest of the team.

And leaders are team members, too, now more so than ever before. They’re the ones who step up and clear the way for everyone else. While they may not often step in and do low-level tasks (it’s not cost-efficient), they’re still willing to roll up their sleeves and help when the team lacks the resources to achieve its tasks. Today’s leader also leads by example, develops talent, and acts as an arbitrator when personalities clash.

INTO THE STORM

While it’s difficult to predict a future in a dynamic field like business, Drucker often made predictions, many of which have come true.

His explication of the evolving role and value of knowledge workers, which he explored toward the end of his career, has proven solid in the years since. While manufacturing will always comprise a significant part of our economy, the white-collar world is where productivity will climb as older technologies mature and new ones appear.

It’s hard to say what the next paradigm change may be. Though radio phones have been in use since World War II, cell phones and related advances in telephony weren’t even a gleam in the eye of the marketplace when Drucker wrote The Effective Executive. Yet their contribution to the growth of productivity has been undeniable—that is, when we can eliminate Schlimmbesserung and compulsive technology addiction from the equation.

Knowledge work is decentralizing. Already, we’re evolving away from the hive mentality. With low-cost Internet connections becoming ubiquitous, a world of outsourcing partners at our fingertips, and computer power doubling every eighteen months, we no longer have to collect in one place to do our work. In fact, telecommuting often makes more sense—though perhaps because it limits real-time control of the workforce and shatters preconceptions about how we should organize business, some executives see it as a threat.⁵¹

We know that honeybees congregate in hives to maximize their productivity. But few of us know about solitary mason bees, which are just as effective and efficient at pollinating plants, and may be the best honey producers.⁵² Before long, I suspect, knowledge work like ours will move away from the hive mentality to the mason bee model. We can still work in teams, and we can still be superbly productive both individually and collectively. But in time, we’ll all become executives as the roles of manager and worker merge.

Corporate structures will simplify and, while they’ll still be profitable and just as amenable to growth and development as ever, the component parts—the individual knowledge workers—will be more independent. This is a good thing. Like the distributed nature of cloud networks, a decentralized workforce ensures that shared culture and projects are spread out over so many components that nothing can easily destroy them—natural disasters, accidents, wars, or terrorist attacks.

My intentions for this book were to outline and update the practices effective leaders should follow to manage their time well in 2020 and beyond.

We’ll have to wait a few decades to see if my vision was 20/20 in its perception of how things continue to change. If nothing else, I feel that we all have to learn to be effective, efficient leaders—because all knowledge workers will almost certainly need these skills going forward.

Thank you for reading this book. I look forward to hearing from you.

Keep the momentum going and continue to develop your time management skills after reading this book! Visit www.3TLeadership.com for free related resources, including a personal journal to take notes as you read, a discussion guide to share with your leadership team, and video lessons to review key learning points.