Management is about doing things right: efficiency and incremental improvement.
Leadership is about doing the right things: choosing what matters and what doesn’t.
Both halves of The Churning provide tools and frameworks to enhance your leadership:
— Inner Leadership shows you how to see the opportunities in any situation, choose the one that is best for you, and inspire yourself and others to pursue it.
— Outer Leadership shows you how to get clear on the key factors for the success of your organisation, the implications, and what to do about it.
In a time of churning, when everything is changing, I believe it is more important to do the right things (even inefficiently) than to do the wrong things efficiently. What do you believe?
Which will you spend most time doing today?
Drucker wrote his stuff in the industrial age. We saw how this played out – decisions made by old white men (OWM) which disconnected company from customer, led a race to the bottom on quality and enabled hype to triumph over substance.
Were these the right things? Or do people say one thing and do another?
Thanks for your comment Peter. It seems to me that Drucker said one thing while the business ‘leaders’ you mention did another.
Drucker also said “The purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer,” but the people you are thinking of who “disconnected company from customer” clearly did not follow that advice either.
As you say, it didn’t work out very well then. To me it is even more important to follow this advice now.