Stone, who today is a partner at the Bridgespan Group in Boston, tries to model her own mentoring style after Drucker's. "I've learned to listen to someone else and to ask them questions that help them clarify their strengths, what their interests are -- and encourage them to build on those."
Finally, Stone says: "For me the most important lesson that Peter has ever taught me is that yeah, you're important -- but the world is important, and what are you going to do for it? It's a dialogue between you and your strengths and a world that needs them."
Bob Buford
Bob Buford ran a multimillion-dollar cable-television company, which he sold in 1999, and was the founding chairman of the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management. Today he has a family foundation; he leads an organization that applies management talent to "megachurches" in the United States; he has written three books; and he runs Halftime.org, which provides seminars to people in midlife looking to shift "from success to significance," he says.
When Buford initially called on Drucker, in the early 1980s, his ostensible goal was help with business issues. But that was something of a ruse, he admits. What he really wanted help on was what he should do with the rest of his life.
He got rather more than he bargained for. Drucker's secret to great mentoring, says Buford, is that he "has the most comprehensive, 50,000-foot view of how the world works, on one extreme. On the other extreme, he's incredibly personal in his mentoring. He joins those two points of view. He describes himself as a social ecologist, and as such, he's always thinking about how things fit together."
Buford needed both perspectives. In January 1987, when he was 47, his only child, a 24-year-old son, drowned. Later that year, Buford himself narrowly escaped dying. He was supposed to take a trip in a small private plane but didn't go. The plane crashed, and four of his friends died. "After all of that, I went to see Peter," he says. Understandably, Buford was feeling vulnerable and scared. According to him, Drucker said, "I know you are feeling a heightened sense of your own mortality right now, but the fact is, you have 25 years or more of your life yet to be lived, and they will be the best 25 years of your life." Says Buford, "He essentially said, 'Put your feet on the ground and get about your work,' and that's what I did."
Later, Drucker helped Buford put his own midlife questioning into a larger context. Drucker sketched out "what the social landscape looked like," says Buford. "The big demographic factor in the developed world has been the baby boom. Everyone's entering midlife, and they all don't have a clue what to do -- they're all utterly unprepared. He told me that he felt I'd done a good job in that area. A lot of that was taking his advice. I felt I had a responsibility to write a lot of that down." Drucker encouraged him in his writing, and the result was Buford's 1995 best-seller Halftime. "Peter's great gift to me is to say 'You can do it.' Here's this utterly Olympian figure telling little me that I can do it."
Much of Drucker's advice sounds simple. How hard can it be to become an Ã"ber mentor, Ã la Drucker? It's impossible, says Buford: "There will never be another Peter Drucker."
Still, mentors and those being mentored can learn from his techniques, which include:
He listens carefully and asks a lot of questions.
He brings a wealth of knowledge to bear in conversations with his advisees. He's a Renaissance man who is incredibly well-read, draws upon an enormous breadth of experience, and has an astonishing memory.
He encourages people and helps them believe in themselves. A Drucker truism: a good mentor or manager builds on people's strengths and helps them make their weaknesses irrelevant.
He teaches people how to use their strengths so that they can fulfill their responsibility to contribute to a world that needs them. He both defines the landscape and identifies what Buford calls "the void" in that landscape -- what is needed now.
Finally, he works only with those people who take his counsel seriously and act on it. As he wrote to us, "One 'secret' of my work is that ... I cannot work with more than a very small number of clients at any one time, though once the relationship is established, it tends to last for a long time -- some for 30 years. So I have the luxury to work only with people where both they and I feel that I can make a very major contribution."
As, indeed, he has.
Elaine Appleton Grant is a senior editor at Inc. Staff writer Jill Hecht Maxwell contributed to this report.
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