Peter's Principles

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History is Drucker's primary tool for complexifying. "I'm not a professional historian," he says, "but I've learned that nothing helps me as much in my work as a little bit of historical knowledge about a country, technology, or industry. Every few years I pick another major topic and read in it for three years. It's not long enough to make me an expert, but it's long enough to understand what the field is all about. I've been doing this for 60 years."

His current project is Chinese history. "I've studied some of the 87 volumes written by Joseph Needham on the history of Chinese science and technology," he says. "Needham started out with the axiom that everything worthwhile had its beginning in China."

But since China never had much interest in society or the economy, Drucker won't stop there, he says. "After China, I may go back to early premedieval history, back to 500 and 1000 A.D. Or maybe the postmedieval, premodern period, beginning with Gutenberg and ending in the middle of the 17th century with the emergence of science and the nation-state system."

Drucker also explores the impact of economics on human nature and of human nature on economics by reading novels. "I'm very much a 19th-century-novel man," he says. "The great novelists are great because they were appreciated during their time. And why were they appreciated? Because they could look and see and so they got it right, mostly, except for Dickens, who made things up."

I've begun trying Drucker's system. I'm interested in the psychology of leadership, and the business literature on this topic is skimpy. With Drucker's approach in mind, I look for answers in a novel, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and in poetry, the Psalms of David. I begin to see something that standard business literature has missed: that leaders have their own glass ceiling; we call it, face-savingly, "the top." Leaders are as bound by inhibitions as people at the bottom of organizations are. Drucker's system of complexifying has cracked open the safe.

Drucker cautions against going too deep. "I hate digging," he says. He teaches himself just enough to get perspective but not enough to lose his own point of view.

Rubin: But how do you keep ahead of all the developments you need to know?
Drucker: A knowledge worker needs one thing only: to learn how to learn.

"Knowledge by definition makes itself obsolete," says Drucker. "Skills last forever.

"My family name, Drucker, means printer," he says. "For centuries, my family never needed to learn anything new. And when archaeologists began to dig out the ruins of Emporia--the greatest trading city of the Mediterranean in Hellenistic times--sometime around 1950, they found the tools the craftsmen used. Except for the screwdriver, which is of medieval invention, there is no tool unearthed from Emporia that is any different from those craftsmen use today. Any shoemaker or cabinetmaker would be just as at home in ancient Emporia as in Berkeley today. A craftsman learned as a child all that he would need for the rest of his or her working life."

But in our knowledge economy, says Drucker, "if you haven't learned how to learn, you'll have a hard time. Knowing how to learn is partly curiosity. But it's also a discipline."

"You don't know anything unless you teach it" has been Drucker's mantra for learning to learn. He's taught American history, Japanese art, religion, and statistics. To teach what you don't yet know helps you learn more than just a new set of facts; you practice the discipline of learning to learn, since new subjects require learning new concepts.

"It's fairly easy to instruct a surgeon in new techniques," says Drucker. "But only in the last 10 or 15 years have we begun to learn about the heart's electrical system. Today's cardiology is centered on knowledge of the electrical system. Older cardiologists cannot grasp that the heart is more than a muscle. It's a concept. Surgeons are brilliant at doing things with their hands. But they are not trained to learn concepts, partly because the old medical schools did not teach students how to learn. The new changes in medicine, and in most fields, are not primarily changes in technology. They are changes in concepts."

Drucker recommends that, to learn how to learn new concepts, doctors teach medieval history (which means they have to learn it deep down in the gut). He suggests that CEOs teach a course in the history of technology.

As important as learning to learn is discovering what you're good at. "It's amazing how few people know what they are good at," Drucker says.

"What comes easy one tends to disparage," he observes. "If it comes easy, value it. One thinks that what comes hard is more valuable because you have to work at it. People don't work on their strengths. Don't work on perfecting your strengths but on removing the unnecessary limits, like a deficiency in knowledge--like a foreign or technical language--or bad habits."

To help people learn what they're good at, Drucker suggests "a learning method developed in the 14th century by an obscure German scholar who recommended that whenever you make a key decision or perform a key activity, write down what you expect to have happen, put the list away, and go back to it nine months or a year later. Then check expectations against results. In no time at all, you know what you do well and what you have to learn to do to get the full effectiveness of your strengths. You also learn what you do poorly. I compose such a list every nine months."

The most vital clue you can have in knowing what kind of learner you are is whether you're a reader or a listener. "People are either one or the other," Drucker says. "Very few people know which they are."

Most of us think of ourselves as both, because we do both. But our strength lies in only one of those two skills. "I am basically a listener who has taught himself to read," says Drucker. "Ten minutes after a client comes in, I have learned more by listening to him than I will have learned from hours of reading his agenda. Even today, with all the reading I have done, I am only a C+ reader. I am better off listening to learn." Which is why he loves teaching--he can hear himself think.

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