Happy 100th Birthday Mr. Drucker

I have four books on my credenza behind my desk. Employee Incentives for Whiners and Crybabies, Decisions I Have Made On My Gut Feelings, Getting In Touch With My Feelings, and Peter F. Drucker's Managing for Results. Drucker's book is the only one that has any words on the pages the other are just there to keep interview candidates on their toes. In a world of management gurus, Peter Drucker called himself a social ecologist. He hated the term guru and said " guru is there only because charlatan would not fit on a business card (or a Twitter message today.) His roll in the world defined the management consultant in world business.

When everything was about efficiency he bridged the gap between the production lines and the end consumer as a social ecologist. He predicted privatization, decentralization, the rise of Japan as an economic power, the emergence of marketing and the information society and it's never ending desire for knowledge.

He bridged the gap for an Economics Major with an MBA to the consumer side of the advertising world. Some could say he was the first planner. (I'm sorry Mr. Drucker) One of my favorite chapters in Managing for Results is chapter 6 or The Customer Is the Business. He outlines 7 Market Realities as the following:

1) What people in business think they know about customer and market is morel likely to be wrong than right. The only one who really knows is the customer.

2) The customer rarely buys what the business thinks it sells him. Nobody pays for a product. What is paid for is satisfaction.

3) The goods and services which the manufacturer sees as direct competitors rarely adequately define what and whom he is really competing with.

4) What the producer or supplier thinks the most important feature of a product to be -what they mean when they speak of its "quality"-may well be relatively unimportant to the consumer. The consumers questions is "What does it do for me".

5) The customers have to be assumed to be rational. But their rationality is not necessarily that of the manufacturer; it is that of their own situation.

6)No single product or company is very important to the market. Even the most expensive and most wanted product is just a small part of a whole array of available products, services, satisfactions.

7) all statements so far imply that we know who the customer is.

One of my favorite and most relevant principles of his today is that the CEO should never be paid more than 20 times the line worker. He wrote, "This is morally and socially unforgivable,and we will pay a heavy price for it.”

A little off subject for the Atlanta Adblog. But it's a great time to remember someone we need today.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Drucker!