Peter's Principles

Passivity like this sounds outrageous to business's make-it-happen-at-any-cost ethic. But in a world built out of intangibles, which is the world of ideas and brands, stepping back and letting fate move you is a sound strategy. It makes you open to recognizing opportunities you could not have imagined possible.

Drucker: Fortune favors the prepared mind.
Rubin: Then how do you prepare your mind?

"Born to see, meant to look." That's Drucker's motto. What does he train his sight on? On the obvious, not on the future, which he believes no one can see. If you can detect what's obvious, you tap into people's greatest needs. It's obvious, for example, that the biggest threat facing the West is population decline, yet most people are still caught in the idea that the future will be a mob scene. Few people have the discipline to detect the obvious. For Drucker it's a matter of looking.

I ask Drucker how he's been able to call the trends again and again even though he doesn't believe in prediction. He says, infuriatingly, "I look out the window." Essentially, Drucker looks at current economic events and compares them with the patterns of history to ground himself in the meaning of those events. And then he seems to ask himself, What's the thing people are most embarrassed about in this picture? In his days observing GM, all the executives were hiding the truth that they were actually doing something called management. The word sounded like voodoo--like applying witches' warts to get people to do more than they could do, to get companies to be better than they were. Ten years ago the truth American workers were eager to hide was that they weren't manufacturers anymore; they were people pushing around symbols--words, figures, information. The dirty secret was that knowledge was the new capital. Yet, we thought of ourselves as a manufacturing, or producing, society. That was what Drucker saw when he looked, and that's his basic methodology.

That is also why he has collected 200 Japanese paintings. They teach him about Japan, but they also teach him how to look.

Drucker takes me into his study. He points to a few black smudges on a yellowed piece of paper on the wall. The painting looks like nothing in the Louvre. I find myself thinking that it's black and white and pitifully austere. Drucker adjusts his thick glasses and looks. "I bet you don't see much in it," he says. I rub my 20/20s. He's right. He starts teaching me the way a Japanese painter would look at things.

He hands me a book, A Concise History of Japanese Art. Inside is a tiny pencil, nesting in a page that says the following:

"The Zen-inspired painter seeks the 'truth' of a landscape, like that of religion, in sudden enlightenment. This allows no time for careful detailed draftsmanship. After long contemplation, he is expected to be able to seize inner truth in a swordlike stroke of the brush. This 'essentialism' can be expressed equally well in a large landscape or in the branch of a tree, in the broadest panorama as well as in each of its minute components...."

Intellectual capitalists work the same way artists do. They think for a long time, and when they act, it's swift. They trust the truth--instinct--more than the details or facts.

The smudges are beginning to make sense. I feel that I'm looking not only at a painting but at a mirror for Drucker. It reflects how he lives and thinks and practices his craft. He looks for a long time at a subject, a company, a trend. Like his beloved Japanese painters, he is perceptual. "I have to see the whole before I can go to work," he says. "I have to see it first; I have to hear it first. I taught subjects for years, and only then did I know what I was thinking about any given matter."

In writing, teaching, and working with clients, Drucker tries to emulate those sharp, swordlike strokes of the Japanese painter. When he describes something--a problem, a scene, a person--he does so clearly, without succumbing to adjectives or any other flourishes that inject the observer's personality.

Try practicing simplicity of description; it's not easy. But the more you practice describing things clearly, the greater your ability to see clearly. Most people interject themselves into descriptions until they don't know what they are looking at. I might say, "I like Jones; she concentrates on her tasks." Sounds straightforward enough, but the comment is full of blind spots. Compare this: "Jones keeps her head bowed in a book. When she looks up, her eyes take a moment to focus." That shows that Jones doesn't merely concentrate; she loses herself in a task, which is a dangerous occupation. If I hadn't described her clearly, unobscured by judgment, Jones's true character--the essential truth--would be lost on me. When others learn to look through you, you are accorded the full weight of authority. To look as a Japanese painter looks is to grasp the essential truth, the inner reality, and not lose your way in the details.

When I complain that the black and white of the painting is austere, Drucker chastises me: "Look! Don't you see that it isn't really black and white; there are dozens of blacks here, and the negative space, the white, is different everywhere."

Drucker, who has sharpened his eye like the Japanese painter, sees nuances, and in those, more than in bright colors, is the truth. That is what it means to have a trained eye. I open the book again and discover that apprentice painters were forced to practice the painting of a round jewel for as long as two years before being allowed to graduate to more advanced studies. "The weaker brethren did not survive the discipline!" it says.

We merely think we see. We miss so much, or we concentrate on the wrong things. Practice seeing the obvious.

Rubin: You never seem to lose sight of the big picture. What keeps you from getting bogged down in details?
Drucker: We can't learn anything by simplifying difficult issues. We've got to complexify them.

Drucker looks for simplicity but likes to convey complexity. He loves simplicity but realizes that getting there means making connections: to the past, to related fields. He answers questions by trotting through history, art, science. Listening to him, you learn not just the answer but also how to make connections between disparate subjects and thus deepen your understanding. It makes you, the listener, more valuable as an adviser and teacher.

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