Business Gurus: The Masters of Management

Peter Drucker: “The man who invented management”

Peter Drucker: The man who invented management

When he died in 2005, the respected Bloomberg Businessweek magazine lauded him as ‘the man who invented management’ – high praise indeed for someone who had devoted his life to the study and improvement of the practice of management[i]. During his lifetime, Peter Drucker wrote over thirty-nine books, which have been translated into a number of different languages and many of the thoughts and ideas contained within them have now passed into accepted business wisdom and practice. His influence was profound on some of the major corporations of his day, together with a number of prominent business and political leaders, which spanned such household names as, IBM, Proctor and Gamble, Intel, and also included the likes of Jack Welch at GE and British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill. His influence is still felt today.

The 'Guru's Guru'

Drucker was one of those rare examples of someone who became a legend in his own lifetime and more than deserving of the epithet, ‘management guru’.  Indeed, he was probably the first management guru of the post-war era. As the Businessweek obituary proclaimed, “[he] was the guru's guru, a sage, kibitzer, doyen, and gadfly of business, all in one. He had moved fluidly among his various roles as journalist, professor, historian, economics commentator, and raconteur. Over his 95 prolific years, he had been a true Renaissance man, a teacher of religion, philosophy, political science, and Asian art, even a novelist. But his most important contribution, clearly, was in business. What John Maynard Keynes is to economics or W. Edwards Deming to quality, Drucker is to management.”[ii]

From Austria to the USA

He had been born in post-war Austria and then moved to the USA after a brief spell in England.  Becoming a US citizen during the Second World War, he taught at a range of colleges across the country, finishing at Claremont College in California, where the Drucker Institute is to be found to this day, which bears his name and continues to keep alive and further his legacy.  Such was the energy of the man that he continued to teach and offer consultancy well into his nineties. He died at the ripe old age of ninety-five, just a few days short of his ninety-sixth birthday.

Front Office/Back Office

Whilst his legacy is significant, the following are just a few of the areas upon which he focused and wrote about in his many books. Firstly, writing in the post-war era of large corporations, Drucker was interested in encouraging businesses to focus on their core activities.  He differentiated between the front office, which dealt with the customer, and the back office, where all the ancillary and support tasks were completed, such as HR and payroll.  Thus he was an early proponent of outsourcing non-core activities, and, as such, he predicted a trend that was to become synonymous with the era of globalization.  He also believed that the large behemoth businesses of the day, such as P&G and GE, needed to decentralize their decision-making, so that they retained their marketing and innovative edge.

The Knowledge Worker

Secondly, in an age when making things was still seen as the cornerstone of a strong economy and the main task of industry, Drucker was ahead of his time in championing the idea of the ‘knowledge worker’ and the corresponding growth of the knowledge economy.  In this respect he foresaw the rise of businesses such as Apple, who do not manufacture the physical product, but derive their profit from their knowledge assets or intellectual property.  Likewise he outlined the type of worker needed to service the growth of this type of industry and the skills required to compete in this new economy.

Leadership is doing things right ...

Finally, it would be remiss of me not to emphasise Drucker’s ideas on leadership and management.  It is Drucker’s words that are often quoted by many students when they are writing an essay on that perennial topic of the distinction between leadership and management: "Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things." Whist his views were very much more detailed than this, it does serve to highlight his belief that the employees were the organization’s most important asset and that they needed to be valued and developed. He believed that management was a skill that could be taught and developed and he scorned the idea of charismatic leadership, claiming that it enabled despots like Hitler, Stalin and Mao to mislead people.  Instead he emphasised the importance of good leadership that was centred on a core mission, focused on the customer and delivering quality through innovation and good service.

There is much more that could be said about Drucker, this brief article is intended to give you just a flavour.  I would encourage anyone to dip into his extensive corpus of books to gain more of an idea of the breadth of subjects that he addressed during a long and prolific lifetime.  One of the best places to start is ‘The Essential Drucker’, which is published by Collins Business Essentials and distils some of his key ideas that spanned a writing career of over sixty years. To finish, I thought I would leave you with some of the other more memorable quotes from this truly remarkable man:

“The best way to predict your future is to create it.”

“Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship...the act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth.”

“Leadership is not magnetic personality, that can just as well be a glib tongue. It is not "making friends and influencing people", that is flattery. Leadership is lifting a person's vision to higher sights, the raising of a person's performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.”

“A manager is responsible for the application and performance of knowledge. ”

“So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work.”

Written by Will Trevor, Founder and Training Consultant at Windsor Training
Email: will.trevor@windsortraining.net

Picture Credit: By Jeff McNeill [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

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[i] Byrne, J, & Gerdes, L. “The Man Who Invented Management”, (2005), Online at: http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2005-11-27/the-man-who-invented-management. Accessed July 31, 2014

[ii] Ibid.

We're all in sales now!

We’re all in sales now!

How developing the mindset of a salesman can help a business thrive.

Cockney barrow boy: Alan Sugar is proud of his
roots selling fruit and veg from a barrow.

When I was selling medical insurance to corporates and the self-employed - and before that in sales recruitment - during the early days the phone would never ring with a hot prospect just falling into my lap – I would have considered that manna from Heaven!  I had to go hunting for business.  If someone did ring up ‘out of the blue’, then you can guarantee that I was straight onto it and either a meeting was booked without delay or the information was provided post haste and follow-up calls arranged.

In the competitive worlds of insurance and recruitment, you can’t afford to leave a prospect un-responded, even if it means you are working on your weekend or your holiday, because they will simply go elsewhere. For a salesman, someone who contacts you is a prospect who probably has a desire and interest in making that purchase now – they are certainly someone keen to know more about your product or service and that makes them part-qualified! You don’t delay and you call them straight back, even if it turns out to be fruitless, but you always know that a hot prospect can turn cold very quickly and that you only have a very short window of opportunity in which to respond.

With this in mind, I recently needed some painting done to our house, in preparation for renting out the property.  I usually ring about five professionals, so that I have a choice and also to ensure that if someone doesn’t get back to me, for whatever reason, then I am not left without any options. All of them went straight to an answerphone or voicemail. The painting job was going to be a few days of work and covered much of the interior of the house – it was a good job for someone. Of the five that I called, I received no response, even though I left a message explaining what I was after and also gave them the opportunity of calling or emailing me – but no one returned my call. I even took to Twitter and got various retweets and some recommendations, but again, no one contacted me directly. Eventually, my lettings agent managed to fix me up with a tenant who was also a painter and decorator and he went straight round and did a first class job.

I am not picking on the building trade, because there are plenty of instances in other industries where a similar thing happens, but I am left scratching my head as to why and I am perplexed how any business owner is prepared to ignore potential trade.  Many of those businesses were small or even sole traders, but most had been located from a weekly local advertising magazine that would have cost them money in which to place a regular advert – clearly their advertising was working, because they had a hot prospect calling them directly, but why weren't they responding?

Partly it is symptomatic of some industries, when the business owner has a pipeline of business for the next few weeks, they are then reluctant to take on any further work, because their current resources and manpower are stretched. I understand that. However, not only am I now a lost customer for that piece of work, I am now a lost customer for any future work and any potential referrals that might arise. ‘Walk ins’, as they call them in retail, are worth their weight in gold, precisely because they have come looking for you, rather than you having to go hunting for them.  When times are good, you may feel that you can turn business away, but if a slump in trade is around the corner, then you need all the goodwill that you can muster.

The point of this post is a simple one: even if you are a sole trader without a sales team to back you up, make sure that you follow up and acknowledge potential leads and particularly those that come looking for you because of your marketing efforts or a recommendation.  Unless you speak with them, you may not find out why they are contacting you and the nature of what they want.  As it happened, I could have waited a few weeks, but none of those painters found that out, because none of them bothered to contact me and ask.  Maybe you could give a recommendation to a competitor, who may then return the favour in a period when they are too busy to accept a job. Maybe it’s a prospect that offers you some regular work and sees you through the next recession. You may not see yourself as being in sales, but developing a bit of the mind-set of a salesman and ensuring that you follow up on every lead, might just mean the difference between a business that grows and thrives and one that just becomes another statistic of business failure.

Oh … and it might just mean that I get my house painted too.

Written by Will Trevor, Founder and Training Consultant at Windsor Training
Email: will.trevor@windsortraining.net

Picture Credit: Damien Everett [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Search Engine Optimisation: impact and visibility (Part 1)

Search Engine Optimization: impact and visibility (Part 1)

Best practice in SEO as part of a search engine marketing strategy

By Koushikchakraborty13 (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process and practice of ensuring that the listing and link to your website is placed in the optimum position within search engine rankings, such that it appears at the top, or near to the top, when a search is made using a specific set of words or key search phrases in Google or Bing, for example.  This is often referred to as ‘natural’ or ‘organic’ search - because it does not require any direct payment to the search engine company in order achieve the ranking - to distinguish it from ‘paid search’,  which is usually classified as any search for which a payment has been made. Examples of paid search include: sponsored links, search engine advertisements, pay per click (PPC), cost per impression (CPM).  The focus of this article is on the principles of successful and legitimate SEO, an approach that is often referred to as ‘white hat’ techniques. That is, techniques that ensure that the main focus of SEO activity is on ensuring that the customer is able to search for what they require and receive search results that provide them with exactly the listings that they need, rather than an approach that seeks to manipulate those results to maximise the possibility that the search engines will rank the page highly, regardless of the relevance of the content to the customer.  The best way to think about this is in terms of a cowboy movie: the good guys usually sport the typical white Stetson, whereas the bad guys are usually in the black ones. Needless to say, in order to achieve the right results, the Stetson on your head should be white!

The basic premise behind SEO is that the more highly a website is ranked in the natural search listings, then the greater the amount of web traffic it receives and the higher the number of visitors accessing the site. In an age where Internet use is ubiquitous and business needs to ensure that it is accessible to its customers online, this obviously has significant consequences for the visibility of an organisation and the corresponding level of business and profit that it is likely to achieve.  Not surprisingly, with such high stakes, a number of websites sought to improve their rankings, not by making the content more relevant to the user, but through the adoption of various techniques that enhanced the sites rankings in the face of the algorithms, or programmes, by which the search engines ranked and listed websites.  These so-called ‘black hat’ techniques included such practices as ‘keyword stuffing’: placing so many key words within sentence, such that they render the words completely unintelligible, but manipulate the search engine into believing that the website is of greater relevance than it really is.

In the first paragraph, I mentioned that SEO is a process, by that I mean that you will not enjoy the benefits of an optimized site if you merely engage in optimization when you first develop the site.  Instead, it should be something that you engage with on a regular and incremental way, with the accumulated impact of a large number of changes delivering an improved user experience to your customers and a payoff in terms of higher rankings within those organic or natural search rankings. By adopting the best 'white hat' techniques, you will be able to develop SEO practices, which will ensure that your website benefits your users and customers.

The common mistake that most people make when they first approach SEO is to believe that the primary target of their activities is in satisfying the rapacious needs of an impersonal and electronic brain called a search engine: this is something that I term the ‘black hat fallacy’. Some of the leading search engines, and particularly Google, have taken pains to reinforce the message that the primary focus needs to be the consumer, or the user of your site, rather than viewing the search engine s the target of your activities. So let us get this straight from the very outset, you are optimising your website for the benefit of your users and not the search engine itself.

SEO may form part of your broader search engine marketing (SEM) strategy, which may itself be an element of your overall marketing strategy.  Whilst you will remember that we are not intending to treat the search engine as the customer of our optimization activities, we do need to have some understanding of how they work and also how people use them to facilitate their searches.  From our market research, we should have a good idea of who the target audience for our product or service is and so we can then develop a clearer picture of the type of search keywords or key-phrases that they are using to find products or services such as ours.  Think for a moment about how you search for something using a search engine, such as Google. How often do you input just a single word (keywords) or how often do you string together a number of words into a set of keyphrases? The next time you search for something, think about what it is that you are looking for and then consider why you selected those specific words. This will help us in the next article when we consider further the practices of SEO.

Written by Will Trevor, Founder and Training Consultant at Windsor Training
Email: will.trevor@windsortraining.net

What's in a Name?

What does the future hold for job title hyperinflation?

By Emile-Jean-Horace Vernet (Sotheby's) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

A few years ago I was at a meeting attended by a group of franchisees who sold medical insurance to corporate businesses and the self-employed.  The chairman went around the room and asked each in turn how they preferred to refer to themselves when introducing their business to potential clients or when out networking - many suggested the term ‘advisor’, but by far the most common label was that of ‘consultant’. Having gone around the room, he then posed a further question: “what’s wrong with being a salesman?” Seemingly everything. He was met with a room full of blank faces and a tacit admission that salesman was not the title that any of the people seated in that room had the intention of adopting any time soon, despite the appropriateness of the label. 

So, what’s in a name? Names do matter, as my previous example suggests, whether they are our personal names, and the umbrage that we take when they are mispronounced or forgotten, or else those arbitrary and temporal names and labels that we are given with our job. At a basic level, the job title should provide a signpost that signifies what we do and what our responsibilities are. One of the other roles that a title fulfils, most importantly for its owner, is that it can confer status and engender respect – as such, it can also be a very powerful, yet cost-effective, tool in encouraging the recruitment and retention of staff.  The latter has perhaps been the most compelling reason why we have seen such drastic changes in the way in which job titles are ascribed, particularly in competitive marketplaces for talent, such as Silicon Valley.

The upshot of this is that we have been witness to an increasingly upward trend of ‘job title inflation’, with a greater use of more elaborate and expressive titles.  Now we are seemingly in a period of hyperinflation, in which excessive and hyperbolic names are increasingly outdoing each other! There is no doubt that a title can be a quick and cost-effective method to improve recruitment of new people and aid the retention of loyal staff, but the overuse of the term ‘manager’, has now rendered it a poor indicator of the management responsibilities of the individual concerned and it has led to a certain degree of cynicism regarding its continued misuse.  More recently, Apple has christened the staff who work in their stores ‘geniuses’ and a number of Silicon Valley businesses have swelled the ranks of their senior management teams with the addition of a Chief Happiness Officer: someone charged with the contentment of the workforce. With regard to the former, I tend to set the bar fairly high when it comes to someone I might choose to call a genius, Stephen Hawking and Isaac Newton certainly fit that description, but the guy that knows how to get my iPad working again deserves my respect, but not the epithet of ‘genius’.

Whilst the increased use of evermore elaborate job tiles seems to show no sign of abating, there is one company that is bucking the trend, Zappos, the online clothing and shoe shop. Whilst they are still retaining, what they term, ‘hashtag names’ to help external stakeholders to identify who does what, internally they have decided to do away with job titles altogether. This is a bold move, but it is also motivated by the fact that job titles are increasingly a very imprecise and ineffective way of indicating what someone does within the organisation. A member of your team may find themselves involved in a range of tasks, from project management to marketing, and trying to shoehorn their responsibilities into a single name, increasingly misunderstands the complexity of the modern workplace and the role of the individual within it.  It will be interesting to see how the Zappos experiment develops.

Nevertheless, names and labels do matter to people – as those franchisees demonstrated in their dislike of the label salesman - and the trend of job title hyperinflation is sure to increase for the foreseeable future, both in the corporate world and also amongst the self-employed.  What it may prompt is a debate about whether titles will matter so much longer term, in a world in which we increasingly need people with a range of skills and abilities and where the lines between specialist tasks are increasingly blurred.  It doesn't take a genius to work out that we may become a little cynical of some of these more outrageous titles, but if I was a ‘futurologist’ - which is a real job title - I might predict that the period of job title hyperinflation hasn't yet fully run its course.

Written by Will Trevor, Founder and Training Consultant at Windsor Training
Email: will.trevor@windsortraining.net

Surviving your Business Nightmares

Surviving Your Business Nightmares

Four business lessons of Gordon Ramsay

Chef Gordon Ramsay: What do you mean 'no crab cakes'?

From the outset I have to admit to being a big fan of the hit TV show, Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, both of the original UK show and the even grittier, though slightly more formulaic, version that airs in the USA.  The expletive-laden outbursts and the ego-maniacal owners, coupled with the confrontations and the final resolution, make for compelling viewing.  Although no further episodes are now going to be made, the show often runs on several channels in the USA at any one time, including BBC America. Nevertheless, whilst this is primarily a piece of popular TV entertainment, there are some valid business lessons that can be drawn from Gordon Ramsay’s style and approach.

If you can't stand the heat ...

Anyone who has ever worked in a restaurant or hotel kitchen can testify to the sometimes febrile and volatile atmosphere that exists. The egos of chefs and owners can often blind them to the reality of what is going on within their business, many agree to appear on the show as a last ditch attempt to save a business that has been hovering over the precipice long before the ‘man in the whitecoat’ puts his head around the door and blasts them with an f-word laden broadside.  Much has been made in the media of the fact that a significant percentage of restaurants subsequently folded after appearing in the show, but this may be more a result of the fact that they were already on the ropes, rather than being directly attributable to Ramsay’s interventions.  Having avidly viewed many of the episodes, here are four helpful business lessons that I feel can be drawn from Gordon Ramsay’s approach, whatever your business:

"I'm Gordon and you are?"

Firstly, there is the personable and team-centred approach to everyone in the organisation, at whatever level. Saying that Gordon Ramsay has a personable and people-centred style of leadership, may sound slightly oxymoronic, given that he is renowned for the explosive and confrontational approach that he adopts in the show. Nevertheless, he always engenders a team spirit amongst the members of the business and approaches everyone, from the pot washer to the manager, in an inclusive and even-handed way. Partly this is personality, but it is also symptomatic of the need to keep a diverse team of people together, such as those you would find in the average kitchen, and tied into a common vision. He tries to pull everyone along who share in the vision, but this doesn't blind him to the need to cut out the deadwood, if they are sabotaging the mission and holding the business back.

"You can't serve the customer that!"

Secondly, no compromise on quality for the customer. He is an acknowledged and respected expert in his field and he has a laser-focus on delivering quality to the customer, even if this requires trampling on a few egos in the process.  He has no time for chefs that lack the passion to ensure that the food leaving from the pass is of the highest quality, made from the best freshest produce; but also in ensuring that the front of house is focused on giving the customer a quality experience. Here his approach is similar to that of Steve Jobs at Apple or Jeff Bezos at Amazon, both of whom were known to blow-up at those who don’t share the same passion and obsession for delivering a quality customer service.

Ego ...

Thirdly, don’t let ego blind you to what is going on within your business and seek help, when you need it.  When we have been running a business for a while, we become proud of that achievement and, sometimes, that pride blinds us to the need to seek help from time to time. A coach or a mentor, which is often the role that Ramsay is playing here, can help us lose the scales from our eyes and focus on a clearer vision for the way ahead. To help achieve this, he often has to confront that self-belief head-on and he is certainly not shy of pricking their egos in order to help them see the best way forward.  Often the coach can see the business more objectively and look beyond the obstacles that we believe to be insurmountable, with solutions that help us achieve our goals and fulfil our vision.

Keep it simple

Finally, keep it simple. Many of the restaurants that he visits have over-long menus or produce unnecessarily complicated dishes. Ramsay encourages them to focus on what they are good at and play to their strengths, whether that is a culinary style or the availability of local home-grown produce.

It’s not often that you can draw business lessons from a hit TV reality show, but Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares may be an exception because of the subject matter and also the format within which they approach the specific problems of each restaurant. In one respect it is a televised version of a management consulting process, but focused on the catering trade. Nevertheless, I do feel that these four business lessons are something from which we could all draw some inspiration, but maybe with not quite so much swearing.

So, what are you waiting for? Get the #$@&% on with it!

Written by Will Trevor, Founder and training consultant at Windsor Training
Email: will.trevor@windsortraining.net

Picture Credit: By 'gordonramsaysubmissions' [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Management and Leadership: could you drop the bomb?

Passing the Buck and the Big Decision

Harry S Truman: "The buck
stops here"

Harry S. Truman was the thirty-third President of the United States of America. History remembers him as the man who took the fateful decision to drop the atomic bomb on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, 1945.  Historians have debated whether the use of the Bomb was justified in appreciably shortening the end of World War Two, or whether it was really the first act in the forthcoming Cold War, aimed at demonstrating to Russia the devastating power available to the USA in shaping the post-war world.


Some commentators suggest Truman claimed not to have felt any remorse about the decision and that he never lost any sleep over it. He didn't shirk that decision and regardless of the consequences - or the ethical dimension to the use of the atomic bomb - he took a decision in full control of the available facts and with a firm appreciation of the potential consequences for life and property. No one before, or since, has been required to make a decision which would cause such an instantaneous and horrifying loss

of life.

The mushroom cloud of an atomic explosion

"The Buck Stops Here"

On his desk in the Oval Office of the White House, Truman famously had a sign which read, "The Buck Stops Here". Truman referred to this sign on a number of occasions, during speeches and public addresses. The phrase comes from the slang to 'pass the buck': meaning to shirk ones responsibility when it resides with you. It originated in poker, where the 'buck' signified whose turn it was to deal, but if they chose not to, they would pass on the buck to the next player. In a speech in 1952, Truman famously said, "You know it's easy for the Monday morning quarterback to say what the coach should have done, after the game is over.  But when the decision is up before you ... the decision has to be made."

"Monday morning quarterbacks"

What does all of this have to do with leadership? You will never have to face a decision so fateful and devastating in its consequences that thousands of lives may be lost in the single sweep of a pen, like Truman had to.  However, you may be called upon to reach a decision that impacts the people who work for you: a loss of livelihood or the end of a career, shutting down a poorly performing team, or reprimanding an unruly manager. Whatever the magnitude of the decision, the measure of your leadership is in recognising the consequences of your course of action and then taking that decision in full knowledge of the facts, as they exist at the time.  The 'Monday morning quarterbacks', as Truman called them, will always find a reason to criticise, armed as they are with the clarity of 20:20 hindsight, but as a leader you need to be someone who people can believe will take the decisions when you are called upon to do so, both big and small.

Dropping the bomb ...

You will never be asked to drop the atomic bomb, but your decision may be a metaphorical 'atom bomb' in the lives of your team or for the future of your business.  To be a real leader you need to able to identify those decisions when they arise and also appreciate that they can only be taken by you. Next time you have a weighty decision to take and you have been procrastinating and stalling the final decision, you might like to recall and reflect upon the example of Harry S. Truman.  Think about whether your team are looking to you with the belief that on your desk resides the sign, "The Buck Stops Here". Could you drop the bomb or will you pass the buck?


Written by Will Trevor, Founder and training consultant at Windsor Training
Email: will.trevor@windsortraining.net

Picture credits: (1) By uncredited photographer (Truman Library) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons; (2) By FEMA News Photo (This image is from the FEMA Photo Library.) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons