Management and the Liberal Arts

"Management is a liberal Art" Peter F. Drucker

Action: What is your plan to develop yourself in the humanities and social sciences? Develop such a plan today. Peter F. Drucker

"Government has nothing, absolutely nothing to do with running a business" Bruce Klassen ca. 1972 (mea culpa)

How can one be an original writer if one doesn't know what's going on in the world or within oneself? How do you set the context for what you write about? The same goes for business. As a leader one must have a sense of history, an interest in psychology, often command of different languages, a philosophical viewpoint. Without these, no business can succeed in a changing climate.

Example: When one of my business acquaintances was first named Vice President of Philanthropy at Hewlett Packard (I believe by Lew Platt), I really did not get it. Hewlett Packard was already thinking of two trends that would influence the company's position, globally.

1) Who really was left as a significant untapped market? The poor of the world living in industrially undeveloped countries. How to open up those huge, untapped markets?

2) When were investors going to start putting their money where their social responsibility lay? Would investors choose to invest in more Socially responsible companies.

By taking a "liberal" approach, Hewlett Packard soon learned about fractional selling, and become one of the leaders on several of the social responsibility indices which were developed. I once did a correlation with a colleague (Dan Gagne). Just for "the fun" of it, I asked him to correlate year end profitability of US public companies with their position in the Fortune 1000 "Perceived Social Responsibility Index". Wow, "without making any claim of causality", the results were astounding. The top 8 most profitable companies were also in the top 11 most socially responsible (again perceived). I passed this startling finding on to the Aspen Institute, which had been looking at this issue across industries.

A liberal, "self questioning attitude" is fundamental to moving toward a paradigm of renewal in all aspects of life including business. This does not mean, as I have said previously that Orthodoxy should have no place in your life. Where are your blind spots? What do you know you know?

Example 2: Of course, suicide bombing is closely linked to religious (especially islamic) fanaticism, right... WRONG! Read the definitive study on "successful" (I use this, maybe, inappropriate word here to mean that the bomber and, at least one of her victims died) suicide bombings Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism by Robert Pape, Your opinion will be dramatically changed by the facts underlying 452 bombings since 1984. Just one example of testing what we know we know against the facts will change the way we think about the world... our market place.

Your reading lists, as a current or future global business competitor need to include, topical reading related to, at least, the following six subjects (from World Out of Balance: Navigating Global Risks to Seize Competitive Advantage by Paul Laudicina).

1. Globalization
2. Technology
3. Demographics
4. The New Consumer
5. The Environment
6. Regulation and Activism

Test what you know you know every day and apply, sometime startling truths to your business.