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Art, Music, and Sports

Drucker on . . . Radiohead?

Peter Drucker loved music—Haydn and Beethoven, Mozart and Mahler. Were the late management philosopher around these days, however, he would undoubtedly be grabbed by the newest offering from an altogether different sort of act: the British rock band Radiohead.

Not its synthesizer-driven sound. Drucker, rather, would be struck by Radiohead’s bold focus on something that far too many businesses overlook: pricing. If effectively tied to an overall marketing strategy, it can be a powerful tool in helping an enterprise seize opportunities.

Last week, Radiohead began to distribute its latest album, In Rainbows. Consumers can download it off the Internet and—here’s the twist—pay whatever they think it’s worth: $2, $10, or nothing at all.

“It’s up to you,” the band tells visitors to its Web site. “No, really. It’s up to you.”

The Complexities of Pricing

Properly pricing a product is no easy exercise. It involves a complex bit of calculus that must take into account not only a business’ up-front investment but also the ongoing costs it expects to incur (as it moves down the learning curve and, presumably, becomes more efficient); the position of its competitors; and the crucial interplay between price and volume.

It also requires a degree of self-restraint. “The first and easily the most common sin” among businesses, Drucker wrote in a 1993 article, “is the worship of high profit margins and of ‘premium pricing.’”

Historically, many companies ignored these factors. They set the price of something simply by adding up all their expenses and then slathering on top as much profit as they thought the market would bear.

As Drucker pointed out, such “cost-driven pricing” was backward. In the end, he concluded, “the only thing that works is price-driven costing”—that is, figuring out what customers believe a product or service is worth and then designing the item accordingly (with a sufficient profit built in to support sustainability and growth, which does not necessarily equate to the highest price that could be obtained).

Trusting the Customer

“Cost-driven pricing is the reason there is no American consumer-electronics industry,” Drucker asserted. “It had the technology and the products. But it operated on cost-led pricing—and the Japanese practiced price-led costing.”

What Radiohead has done is take things to an even more sophisticated level. In effect, the band has embraced to the extreme the idea of “value-based pricing”: charging customers what you believe they’re willing to pay, given the benefits provided them. In the business-to-business market, in particular, this means establishing different prices for different consumers for the very same product, based on its value to each.

Since word of Radiohead’s pricing plan broke earlier this month, reactions have ranged from nonplussed to nearly apoplectic, with some predicting that the band’s take-it-to-the-people approach will help hasten the demise of the big record labels. (Radiohead recently ended its relationship with giant EMI Group.)

I’m far from convinced that the release of this one album, in and of itself, will prove ruinous for the industry. But I would bet on this: It’s bound to help the band enhance its own bottom line.

A Concert Draw

Thomas Nagle, coauthor of the classic The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing, is also impressed by Radiohead’s savvy. Twenty years ago, when the first edition of his book was published, he cited the wisdom of musicians who charged relatively little for their concerts because these live performances were what drove record sales—then the most lucrative part of the business.

Now, he says, “the world has flipped.” By pricing In Rainbows so flexibly—including presenting the option of paying the ultimate bargain-basement price, nada—Radiohead may well attract new fans that will fill its concerts, which are the real money machines of music today.

Beyond that, Radiohead is selling a souped-up version of In Rainbows (featuring a pair of vinyl LPs, a CD with extra songs, and photos) for around $80. Some observers have suggested that the digital download may thus act as a kind of “loss leader,” hooking in folks who’ll then be inclined to fork over a mint for the more expansive package.

But here’s the funny thing: The In Rainbows download could well turn out to be a leader at no loss.

Nagle notes that consumers are often willing to pay for something, even if they can get it for free, as long as they perceive that it’s a fair deal. And sure enough, a poll conducted by the music magazine NME indicates that Radiohead fans are, on average, plunking down $10 for their digital copy of In Rainbows—right in line with what Apple’s iTunes charges for most albums.

All of which, of course, validates a page right out of the Drucker songbook: “What the customer sees, thinks, believes, and wants, at any given time, must be accepted by management as an objective fact and must be taken as seriously as the reports of the salesperson, the tests of the engineer, or the figures of the accountant.”

October 11, 2007

Peter Drucker’s Winning Team

In the summer of 1985, an executive named Peter Bavasi pored over a Harvard Business Review article by Peter Drucker in which the great management thinker described the “widow maker”—a job so inherently impossible that it was apt to defeat even the best and brightest.

Drucker’s warning—“Any job that ordinarily competent people cannot perform is a job that cannot be staffed”—was especially ominous for Bavasi. He had, you see, just become president of the Cleveland Indians, a sports franchise to which the word “hapless” seemed inextricably tied.

So Bavasi called Drucker to seek his counsel, and there began a relationship that, with the new baseball season just under way, is well worth revisiting for what it can teach all managers, whether on the diamond or off.

Wanted: Organizational Expert

The 1985 season, during which the Indians had lost 102 games and won a mere 60, had given way to 1986 by the time Drucker came aboard as a full-fledged consultant. The Austrian-born professor enjoyed watching America’s national pastime, and he had even struck up a friendship with Hall of Famer Yogi Berra when the two oft-quoted figures were neighbors in New Jersey in the early 1970s. (Drucker: “The best way to predict the future is to create it.” Berra: “Prediction is very hard, especially when it’s about the future.”)

Bavasi, though, wasn’t looking for a baseball guy. He needed an organizational expert, someone who could help teach his entire operation, from the equipment manager in the clubhouse to the skipper in the dugout, how to be more effective at a broad range of tasks. In fact, Bavasi had long been a big believer in Drucker’s concept of MBO, or management by objectives.

MBO—by which managers throughout the organization jointly identify goals, clearly define each individual’s responsibility for meeting them, and figure out how to measure the results—has had its share of critics over the years. Some, for instance, say the system is difficult to implement and doesn’t work well in rapidly changing environments. Drucker, who had introduced the idea in his 1954 landmark, The Practice of Management, himself pointed out that MBO was no silver bullet against inefficiency. It works, he emphasized, only “if you first think through your objectives.” Yet he pointed out “90 percent of the time, you haven’t.”

Assembling the Right Staff

Bavasi, however, found MBO was perfect for a baseball team, in part because the objectives were so unmistakable. “It’s a business of absolutes,” he told me. “It’s win-lose, ball-strike. There’s no in-between. There’s no maybe.” And so he drew up a 450-page strategic and operating plan, which was based on MBO and covered every department of the Indians.

Drucker tempered it slightly, advising Bavasi to make the objectives more qualitative and less quantitative as he moved from areas such as ticket sales to the ball club itself. To hold the manager to an exact number of wins, Bavasi explains, “would have put too much pressure on everybody.” Instead, Drucker suggested the Indians concentrate on putting together the right kind of coaching staff that would ultimately lead to more victories.

To that end, he prompted Bavasi and his inner circle—the Indians’ manager, general manager, and player personnel director—to think not only about honing the squad’s physical skills, but tending to its emotional and intellectual development as well. With Drucker’s guidance, Bavasi brought on a Spanish-speaking coach who could relate to his young Latino players. He made sure that one of his coaches was an avuncular sort the players could lean on, while another was tough enough to give them the occasional kick in the butt. “What he reminded us was that if we managed the human aspect,” Bavasi says, “it would lead to productivity on the field.”

The Hard-to-Manage Players

Drucker (who charged $5,000 a day) wasn’t a constant presence. He was teaching in California at the time and would meet with Bavasi and the boys only when they traveled to Anaheim to play the Angels. Nor did he decree anything. Mostly, says Bavasi, “he consulted by probing, asking layers of questions, our answers to which began to reveal new ways of approaching old problems.”

Drucker was also “a master,” Bavasi recalls, at “creating discussions about certain hard-to-manage players.” Among them was relief pitcher Ernie Camacho, who had a penchant for turning in a terrific season, only to follow up with a lousy one.

“Well,” Drucker said, “looking at his statistical history we can conclude that he is a regressive personality. We see a lot of that among top-flight computer programmers. They will be given a very complex assignment and write brilliant code. Their next assignment will end up mediocre, sometimes even a disaster. Then they’ll write something brilliant. Up, down. On, off. Just like your pitcher.”

Turnaround Ace

Bavasi remembers Manager Pat Corrales perking up, sensing Drucker “was about to reveal the answer” to stabilizing the erratic reliever. “Peter,” Corrales asked, “what can we do to get this guy to be more consistent?”

“Patrick,” answered Drucker, in his formal manner, “the way I see it, there’s only one thing you can do.” Finally, after a long pause, he said, “You should consider trading this man as soon as you can.” (Camacho lasted another year with Cleveland before joining the Astros.)

Bavasi left after the ’86 season, and Drucker didn’t consult for the team anymore. But while he did, the turnaround was undeniable: The Tribe won an impressive 84 games, and attendance at Cleveland Stadium soared to nearly 1.5 million from just 655,000 the year before.

“Peter had a lot to do with getting us focused as an organization,” Bavasi says. “He had us look at everything we were doing to see if there was a good rationale behind it. . . . Peter was our MVP.”

April 10, 2008

Organizations Need Structure and Flexibility

There is certainly no shortage of management lessons to be gleaned from Michael Phelps’ record-shattering performance at the Beijing Olympics—the importance of setting firm objectives and staying sharply focused perhaps chief among them.

Nevertheless, I suspect that Peter Drucker would have been more intrigued by the blows suffered in the boxing ring than by the gold gathered in the swimming pool. It was there, in the square circle, that the U.S. turned in its worst-ever showing, winning but a single bronze medal and sending disheartened fans scurrying to figure out what went wrong.

Interestingly, the answer appears to have relatively little to do with the fighters’ athletic prowess and quite a lot to do with the way the team was run. Those in charge of the nine-man Olympic squad ignored a couple of basic principles that Drucker—though more a student of social science than of the sweet science—pounded home: the need for clear direction and yet, at the same time, a certain degree of organizational flexibility.

Too Many Coaches

In large part, the pugilists’ problems can be traced to a move made last year: Members of the U.S. team had to leave their homes—and the care of their personal coaches—to live and train for 10 months as part of a new residency program at the U.S. Olympic Committee facility in Colorado. This, in turn, led to several major miscues—the kind that can plague any enterprise, if it’s not careful.

The first was that, once in Beijing, at least several U.S. boxers didn’t seem to know whom to listen to: the Olympic coach, Dan Campbell, or their longtime personal coaches. The Olympic staff told light flyweight Luis Yanez, for instance, to be aggressive from the opening bell of his big bout. But his hometown coach, to whom he felt tremendous fidelity, counseled patience. “You have the kid caught in between,” Campbell told reporters. Yanez lost.

Drucker, for one, wouldn’t have been surprised at the outcome. “In any institution, there has to be a final authority,” he wrote in his 1999 book, Management Challenges for the 21st Century, “someone who can make the final decisions and who can expect them to be obeyed.”

Conflict of Loyalties

But unless it’s made plain whose role that is, confusion can arise. To be successful, any organization “has to be transparent,” Drucker explained. “People have to know and have to understand the . . . structure they are supposed to work in. This sounds obvious—but it is far too often violated in most institutions (even in the military).”

The toughest situation, he added, is when people feel pulled in two directions, the way the boxers did. “It is a very old principle of human relations that no one should be put into a conflict of loyalties,” Drucker asserted, “and having more than one ‘master’ creates such a conflict.”

Yet Drucker recognized that rigidity isn’t the right course, either—and it’s here that those directing the U.S. boxing team (and surely a great many other managers) could profitably reconsider their approach.

Organize Flexibly

A common mistake in both management theory and practice, Drucker noted, is that we tend to become fixated on organizing things one way—and one way only. Depending on the era, we make it all about collaboration or all about decentralization or all about command-and-control.

But in truth, “there is no such thing as the one right organization,” Drucker wrote. “There are only organizations, each of which has distinct strengths, distinct limitations, and specific applications. It has become clear that organization is not an absolute. It is a tool for making people productive in working together. As such, a given organization structure fits certain tasks in certain conditions and at certain times.”

Frequently, it’s assumed that “institutions are homogenous and that, therefore, the entire enterprise should be organized the same way,” Drucker continued. “But in any one enterprise . . . there is need for a number of different organization structures coexisting side by side.”

Tricky Coordination

For the boxers, this suggests that the best way forward may well be a blend, with weeklong periods of training at the Olympic site combined with personal coaching at home that is designed to reinforce the strategy set by the national team. Making this work would require deft coordination—and constant communication—among the different coaches to ensure that everyone is on the same page, but there’s no doubt that it’s doable. In fact, the women’s gymnastics team operates under just such a model.

Jim Millman, the chairman of USA Boxing, has already indicated that he’s interested in making some changes—though just how extensive remains to be seen. If Drucker is any guide, Millman and his colleagues shouldn’t hesitate to be bold, especially given how high expectations were for the U.S. boxing team in Beijing. Some observers even thought this group might snare the most medals since 1984, when the U.S. collected 10 golds and two silvers in the ring.

“Unexpected failure . . . should be taken as seriously as a 60-year-old man’s first ‘minor’ heart attack,” Drucker wrote. What’s more, good leaders “do not dismiss unexpected failure as the result of a subordinate’s incompetence or as an accident but treat it as a symptom of ‘systems failure.’”

That’s vintage Drucker, never pulling a punch.

August 29, 2008

Making Music with Drucker

As rockers, rappers, and country crooners scoop up their Grammy Awards this weekend, you can be certain that they’ll thank all kinds of people for helping to make them stars: producers, agents, the fans, and, of course, many a mom.

But there’s one Grammy winner of years past that feels it owes a debt to a very different sort of influence: Peter Drucker.

Pasadena (Calif.)–based Southwest Chamber Music has long drawn on Drucker’s insights to help it manage the enterprise effectively, as well as to tailor its musical selections. By constantly questioning which programs and strategies have become obsolete, Southwest offers some valuable lessons that can help any organization—no matter what kind of business it’s in—hit the right notes. “Reading Drucker became this incredible lightbulb for me,” says Jan Karlin, the executive director of Southwest, which snared Grammys in 2003 and 2004 for the first two volumes of the Complete Chamber Music of Carlos Chavez.

Verdi Influenced Drucker

That an outfit such as Southwest would have a strong affinity for Drucker’s work is not surprising, really. Drucker, who saw “management as a liberal art,” peppered his books and articles with references to music. “The key to greatness” in any organization, Drucker wrote in a 2002 essay for Harvard Business Review, “is to look for people’s potential and spend time developing it. . . . To build a world-class orchestra requires rehearsing the same passage in the symphony again and again until the first clarinet plays it the way the conductor hears it. This principle is also what makes a research director in an industry lab successful.”

Notably, Drucker counted Giuseppe Verdi, the nineteenth-century Italian composer, as having a tremendous impact on him. In the late 1920s, Drucker lived in Hamburg, where he worked as a trainee at a cotton export firm. Every week, he’d escape the drudgery of his job by going to the opera, and it was there that he heard Verdi’s Falstaff. “I was totally overwhelmed by it,” Drucker recalled.

But what impressed him most was when he later discovered that Verdi’s masterpiece—“with its gaiety, its zest for life, and its incredible vitality,” as Drucker put it—had been written by a man of 80. “All my life as a musician,” Verdi declared, “I have striven for perfection. It has always eluded me. I surely had an obligation to make one more try.” Drucker said that these words from Verdi became his “lodestar,” helping inspire him to write into his nineties.

Defining a New Mission

For Southwest, Drucker’s teachings form a basis to examine all kinds of things, including the most fundamental aspects of the organization. Karlin, for instance, says that her grounding in Drucker made it clear that after Southwest had won its Grammys, it needed a new mission statement. The old one—“to energize and renew the standard chamber music repertory by integrating the best of contemporary world and early music in programs and concerts”—had largely been fulfilled.

“We started thinking, what are we going to do next?” says Karlin, displaying an entrepreneurial orientation that demands certain initiatives be abandoned to make way for the future. Southwest’s new mission: “to provide the Southern California and international music communities with concert, recording, and educational programming that reflects the vast diversity of art music from around the world.”

This fresh approach has led Southwest to focus on the rich cultural diversity in its own backyard—particularly in the Latin and Asian communities—and has opened the door to new adventures abroad.

Asking the Right Questions

Next year, Southwest will take part in a State Department–sponsored cultural exchange with Vietnam that will involve both musical performances and workshops on arts management featuring Drucker’s principles.

Today, amid a difficult financial environment, Karlin and her husband, Southwest Artistic Director Jeff von der Schmidt, are asking a Drucker-like question that is meant to help them spot further opportunities, even with all the challenges: “If we were to begin Southwest now, what would it look like?”

“Peter would have encouraged us to rethink the organization—and that’s what we’re doing,” says Karlin, who has produced a balanced budget for each of the 22 years Southwest has existed.

No One Is Immune

For his part, von der Schmidt says Drucker’s writings have given him a way to consider the tough artistic choices he must make between embracing new music and sticking with classical compositions. “There really does have to be a balance of continuity and change,” says von der Schmidt, pointing to one of Drucker’s central themes.

In 2007, Southwest hired Michael Millar, who received his doctorate from Claremont Graduate University, where he studied both musical performance and arts administration. For the latter, his professors included none other than Peter Drucker.

Karlin and von der Schmidt were already familiar with Drucker when Millar arrived, but he has ensured that Drucker’s emphasis on mission, customer, results, and plan has been embedded deeper throughout the organization. No one is immune. “It’s about making everybody—even the musicians—more effective in what they do,” says Millar, Southwest’s development director and bass trombone player.

Connecting with Strengths

Millar invokes Drucker, as well, when he shows young people how to play. The typical way to teach an instrument, he says, is for the instructor to listen and then say, “Here’s what you did wrong.” Millar flips it around, asking, “Now tell me what you did—and start with what you did right.”

“Students are able to connect with their strengths and make their weaknesses irrelevant,” he explains. “Everybody needs to understand what they do well.”

For Southwest itself, that’s been turning Drucker into beautiful music.

February 6, 2009

Management Lessons on Nothingness, Drawn from Art

Some of the world’s sharpest minds on management and leadership—Warren Bennis, Ken Blanchard, Charles Handy, Stephen Covey, Frances Hesselbein, and Jim Collins, among them—came to Southern California last week to lecture and help commemorate what would have been Peter Drucker’s hundredth birthday. The speakers’ remarks, in which they linked Drucker’s ideas and ideals to their own, were chock-full of insight and inspiration.

And yet it was another Drucker Centennial event—the Monday night opening of a Japanese art exhibition—that left the biggest impression on me.

The Sanso Collection, as it’s known, contains about 200 paintings, roughly half of which are associated with Zen Buddhism. Drucker, who in addition to being a management professor once taught Japanese art, loved these pieces. And he’d often use them as an excuse to pause and ponder and see the world in a different way.

Lots of Empty Space

Similarly, “he encouraged viewers to look, and look again,” says the show’s curator, Bruce Coats, a professor of art history and the humanities at Scripps College and a longtime friend of Drucker’s.

But what Drucker hoped people would zero in on was more than the images, which include fifteenth-century landscapes and nineteenth-century sketches of monks and deities. He wanted them to observe, if not revel in, the art’s omnipresent nothingness. “The Japanese paintings are dominated by empty space,” Drucker wrote in Song of the Brush, a book about the collection. “It is not only that so much of the canvas is empty. The empty space organizes the painting.”

The same, of course, holds true for ourselves and our enterprises: It’s the creation of empty space—moments when we shut off all outside distractions and give ourselves the opportunity to think—that can determine whether we’re organized effectively and whether we’ll move forward successfully.

Nevertheless, we clutter our canvases instead. Punch the term “information overload” into Google and you get more than 1.4 million hits—itself a sign of the problem. In his book The Ten Commandments for Business Failure, former Coca-Cola President Donald Keough cites one analysis that found the typical corporate employee is besieged by 133 e-mails every day.

Omnipresent Cacophony

Beyond that, Keough writes, “they deal with multiple communications—a fax here, a text message there—attend a meeting here and teleconference with another meeting there—watch a PowerPoint presentation here, watch a video report there. Phones ringing on the desk and vibrating in the pocket. The average human nervous system is not built to process material at anything approaching this blinding rate of speed and volume.”

Some systematically fight off this onslaught. For instance, when Patty Stonesifer became CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, she made a point of keeping her Fridays unscheduled so she could study, learn, and refresh herself.

Keeping the calendar blank isn’t easy, however, even for the most well-intentioned executive. Often, Drucker warned, “within a few days or weeks, the entire discretionary time will . . . be gone again, nibbled away by new crises, new immediacies, new trivia.” That’s why the most able time managers, he explained, “keep a continuing log and analyze it periodically,” pruning additional activities as necessary.

Still, it’s not just “inbox shock” and meeting fatigue that one must guard against. Put any project or deal into motion, and “it’s difficult to stop,” Keough asserts. “There is a tendency toward group wishing in decision making wherein everyone is so eager to make something happen that straight thinking becomes almost impossible.”

Time to Think

Keough’s advice for any leader: Cease what you’re engaged in every now and again and chew on it for a while. “Time to think is not a luxury,” he says. “It is a necessity. . . . Unless somebody stops to think . . . it’s easy to make the same mistakes over and over.”

This isn’t simply a matter of focus. As I’ve noted in this column previously, Drucker was a big advocate of doing one thing at a time, and doing it well. But he also believed in not doing, so as to make time for pure contemplation. “Follow effective action with quiet reflection,” Drucker said. “From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action.”

Tellingly, this is a theme that cropped up several times during last week’s Drucker Centennial celebration. In his keynote address, author Jim Collins urged people—especially young people—to “turn off your electronic gadgets,” put “white space on your calendar,” and take advantage of these “glorious pockets of quietude.” And during his introduction of British social philosopher Charles Handy, Kai Ryssdal of public radio’s “Marketplace” mentioned a scheme that Handy once had: to substitute his own “Thoughts for Today” on the BBC with a “Silent Pause for the Day.”

Handy’s notion, Ryssdal recalled, was to give listeners two minutes in which they could sit quietly and ruminate before heading out “into the hurly-burly of everyday life.” Handy’s producers nixed the idea, recognizing, as Ryssdal pointed out, that “two minutes of complete silence is not great radio.”

It is, though, great management.

November 13, 2009

Japanese Baseball and Management Revelations

Last week’s official start for Major League Baseball brought with it some of life’s most joyful sounds: the crack of the bat, the snap of the mitt, and the flutter of the printed page.

For Opening Day invariably means not only a new season but also a shelf full of new books about the game, including this year’s MVP (most valuable publication): Willie Mays: The Life, the Legend by James Hirsch. For those whose tastes run more to the business section, meanwhile, there is an improbable title bound to pique even their interest: What If a Female Manager of a High School Baseball Team Read Drucker’s “Management”?

Currently available only in Japanese, the novel has become a sensation overseas. It has sold more than 300,000 copies in just a few months and currently sits as the No. 3 best seller on Amazon’s Japanese list. There is talk of an English translation. (The book’s author, Natsumi Iwasaki, is donating some of the royalties to the Japan Drucker Workshop and the Peter F. Drucker & Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management; both are affiliated with the Drucker Institute, which I run.)

Corporate executives, more than diehard baseball fans or curious teens, have proven so far to be the primary audience for the narrative, as they consider its key lessons. One crucial insight: “The organization starts with the customer,” Iwasaki told me. Or as Drucker put it: “‘Who is the customer?’ is the first and the crucial question in defining business purpose and business mission. It is not an easy, let alone an obvious, question. How it is being answered determines, in large measure, how the business defines itself.”

Management Story

In Iwasaki’s story, a student named Minami Kawashima unexpectedly becomes the manager of the baseball team at Tokyo’s Hodokubo High—a position in Japan that’s roughly one part clubhouse attendant and one part team caretaker. When she assumes this role, she doesn’t know much about the job or the players with whom she must now work.

What she quickly realizes, however, is that they’re a bunch of under-achievers, talented athletes who are unmotivated and not performing up to par.

Then one day, Minami stumbles across a version of Drucker’s 1973 classic, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices. She devours it and begins taking action. Among Minami’s first steps: setting clear objectives, just as Drucker prescribed. “Objectives are not fate; they are direction,” Drucker wrote. “They are not commands; they are commitments. They do not determine the future; they are means to mobilize the resources and energies of the business for the making of the future.”

In Minami’s case, her ultimate goal is for the squad from Hodokubo to claim Japan’s high school baseball crown, the Koshien National Championship. To get there, she embraces a number of Drucker’s basic principles, all hinted at by the names of the book’s chapters: “Minami Addresses Marketing,” “Minami Tries to Harness People’s Strengths,” “Minami Takes on Innovation,” “Minami Thinks About What Integrity Is.”

Primary Customers

Many readers seem to be inspired by the protagonist. Even though Minami is a young woman—not exactly a position of high stature in traditional Japanese society—and occupies a lowly position within the organization, “she found a way to make a big difference,” says Emi Makino, who is studying at the Drucker School (and who served as my translator when I chatted with Iwasaki). “It shows that anyone can be empowered to make a contribution.”

Perhaps the biggest revelation for the team comes about when Minami helps them figure out who their primary customers are. The answer: the boys’ parents, a realization that spurs them to live up to their abilities.

“They first have to give back a sense of satisfaction to the parents,” Iwasaki explains. “That’s what those customers value: touching moments” on the field. The team then “galvanizes around that mission, and the wheels start turning.”

The 41-year-old Iwasaki is a relative newcomer to this way of thinking, having discovered Management in 2006, a year after Drucker died. At the time, the online gaming enthusiast was trying to figure out how to more effectively organize people to play. A blogger noted that he was reading Drucker to help him with this, and so Iwasaki decided to do the same.

He soon found that he wasn’t just interested in Drucker’s ideas; he also was deeply moved by them. “Management is really a work of art, a historic achievement,” says Iwasaki, who himself has written for Japanese television and produces comedy events for stage and screen.

Sense of Community

Iwasaki suggests that his book’s popularity may reflect a change in Japanese culture. After a period in which people became “scattered all over the place” and “lost a sense of community,” he believes that a collaborative spirit may be coming into vogue again. “There are signs of people wanting to work together,” Iwasaki says. “In that context, Drucker’s words really sink in.”

As crazy as all this may seem, Drucker would have very likely appreciated Iwasaki’s book. He loved Japan and had a close relationship with some of the nation’s leading companies for many years. He also loved baseball. In the mid-1980s, Drucker advised the Cleveland Indians and helped revive the then-struggling franchise.

Through the exploits of Minami Kawashima, Iwasaki has put the two pieces together, a literary double play.

April 13, 2010