Peter Drucker's Humanism

Peter Drucker, father of modern management theory, died Nov. 11, in Claremont, CA at the age of 95. Obituaries have recounted his historic contributions to modern management theory; Drucker was the first to bring attention to the shift into what he termed "Post-Capitalist Society" (1993), a society in which knowledge, and the creation of knowledge, replace capital as the principal source for increasing profitability and as the engine of economic growth. Drucker coined the term "knowledge worker," and believed that the principal challenge of business in the 21st century is to increase the productivity of these workers.

For me, Drucker's most important contribution is the deep humanism that guided his prodigious intellect. His core values included integrity, democracy, community, and a workplace that enables employees "to realize their potential." He argued that one of the principal ways of increasing the productivity of the "knowledge worker" is to offer "exceptional opportunities to be effective."  These opportunities include understanding how one's work contributes to the organization's strategic goals, and the chance to make meaningful contributions to the customer and the world. Assisting people to make sense of their work acknowledges not only the corporate need for profits, but also the human need for meaning.

Prof. Joseph Novak shares Drucker's value for knowledge and carries on Drucker's efforts to "provide people with exceptional opportunities to be effective." Novak, who developed concept mapping in the 1970's, led a research team at Cornell University to discover and create more effective ways to facilitate knowledge creation and meaningful learning. Concept mapping has provided a generation of students and teachers in dozens of countries with exceptional opportunities to be effective learners and knowledge creators.

In the 1990's, Novak applied concept mapping, and principles of meaningful learning, to the work of R&D teams in a multinational consumer products company renowned for innovation. While the details remain proprietary, broadly speaking, what Novak did was to create concept maps of the collective knowledge of R&D teams in relation to a question that focused on the team's job of creating new, profitable products. The results were impressive: effective team learning, a shared vision that aligned all team members with the company's goals, boosted morale, and increased useful knowledge. The combined effect was markedly shorter time-to-innovation and successful new products. Additional benefits included team members' increased sense-of-agency and pride-in-work.

In recent years, concept mapping has been used to augment performance and enhance innovation in business by mapping team knowledge, core values, core competencies, software user requirements, and the competitive business landscape.

For the past two decades, I have been involved with the application of technology to create environments and tools that enable students and workers to engage with knowledge in the way experts do. This work puts understanding, knowledge creation and meaning making at the heart of the enterprise.  Inspired by a series of conversations with Joe Novak (who chaired my doctoral committee at Cornell), I decided to attend the 1st International Conference on Concept Mapping in Pamplona, Spain, in September, 2004.  I was excited by the results shared by conferees--teachers, researchers, and business people--from over twenty countries.

In the weeks following the conference, I decided to create See What You Know (www.seewhatyouknow.com) to mesh all I've learned about designing environments to enable knowledge creation and superior performance while engendering community, fresh-thinking, creativity and honoring the power of human intelligence.

I work with clients in the tradition of Novak and Drucker to unleash creative intelligence, to enable people to be exceptionally effective, and to increase their ability to make sense of their work and their world. I use a collection of facilitative processes I've developed over the years--during my ten-year management career at Apple Computer, Inc., and in my work as an educator. See What You Know's clients are creative individuals, and innovative, knowledge-creating organizations that value knowledge and the people who create it.

I look forward to sharing this exciting work, my thoughts, experiences and results with you in the coming weeks and months. I look forward to meeting and getting to know kindred spirits from around the world.

Here are links to Peter Drucker's 1994 Godkin Lecture at Harvard, "The Knowledge Worker and The Knowledge Society", and an interview with him. I hope that you find them useful.

The Godkin Lecture, Harvard: Knowledge Work & The Knowledge Society (1994)
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The Corporation That Plays Together Stays Together: An Interview with Peter Drucker
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Visit My Website
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Comments

[Sardar Qalandari]

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Best regard
Sardar Qalandar

[Jan Talbot]

We are openly developing a weblog to monitor what will Knowledge Management's biigest breakthrough of 2006 be seen to be with the benefit of hindsight and judged by our understanding of how to live and learn as a Druckerian Knowledge Worker. If this interests you, whynot co-edit with us. Many netizens the world over are united in feeling -a great debt to Peter's flow of human leadership wisdom- so we need a diverse panel to connect Drucker's school's deepest diversities now that the founder is no longer physically among us. http://kmclass2006.blogspot.com/

[Denham]

Posted to KnowledgeBoard's homage to Drucker:

http://www.knowledgeboard.com/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=147746

[Paul Rogland]

Drucker is to be honored for pointing out that the employee/worker is at the very core of business activity, and management must plan to unleash their creativity and potential.

If this is indeed the information age -- which it is -- then an activity such as concept mapping is of vital importance to greater productivity. I think the quote you use from Hewlitt Packard, "If HP knew what HP knows, it would be three times more profitable," is the most telling statement there is.