Masters of the Univers(als)
I’ve been reading Peter Drucker a lot lately. Who, you ask, is Peter Drucker? For over forty years, he has been the so-called dean of business literature in the United States. He has authored scores of books about executive effectiveness, the philosophy of management, and coined the term information economy (ring any bells?). He was one of the first so-called management consultants, a profession he began in the mid 1940s for such clients as Alfred P. Sloan. His body of work is the forerunner of more contemporary effectiveness literature such as Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and has earned him a place in the pantheon of management/professional/interpersonal thinkers such as Lao Tzu, Epictetus, Sun Tzu, et al.
According to Drucker, all problems are essentially generic in nature. But what does that actually mean, you ask? I’ll attempt to elucidate the Dean’s words with a rather mundane example: let’s say that you own a particularly difficult toaster. Each and every morning, you put two pieces of cinnamon raison bread into its slots. You then offer up a prayer to the toast gods, that they may choose to spare your breakfast this morning. However, after several minute of tense waiting, the toaster spits out your offering like an angry volcano. And why does this happen? The reason, dear reader, is painfully obvious: with some crucial piece of the toaster’s mechanism malfunctioning, any bread you put into it will be similarly reduced to nuclear ash. This issue is generic, because we can generalize that any other toaster which contains the same set of malfunctioning components will become a toast destroyer.
Where are we going with this, you ask? Drucker, in his attempt to spell out the critical characteristics of an effective executive, declares that anyone worthy of the name must be capable of making good decisions. Furthermore, any capable of methodically making good decisions must first understand that all problems are have a broad, generic base. Good decision makers don’t make many decisions; rather, they focus their intellectual energies on the core of the issue at hand, and make monumental decisions that address the problems core. They may go back to their previous decisions and make numerous small adjustments as their understanding of the issue evolves, but these are analogous to the course corrections of a cargo ship on the Pacific Ocean bound for Hong Kong that must plot a new course around a storm. The destination hasn’t changed, although the tactics to get their alter with the introduction of new information.
Drucker appears to be in good company: Aristotle states in the first book of his Metaphysics that knowledge of everything belongs to the man who can understand the universals. Universals, he continues, are the broad generalities that encompass all individual events and occurrences in our universe. What makes them the true gauge of wisdom? They lie below the surface, many layers of abstraction removed from the visible world of our senses, and hence require the greatest level of intellectual power to comprehend.
I’ve read several of Drucker’s books, and Covey’s as well. Like anyone reading effectiveness literature, I do this because I see holes in the armor of my own “effectiveness”, and want desperately find some sort of caulk that will plug them. Being human, however, I understand that this is ultimately too much to ask. That’s what I like about Drucker (and Covey to a certain extent): they embrace the realities of life that most decisions are fated to be wrong, that many projects are doomed to go awry. The best we can do is develop a methodical approach to addressing problems that is based on the understanding that issues are best addressed with universal principals. Like Voltaire’s Candide, all we can do is cultivate our gardens and do the best we know.
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