Chances are that you are part of the most crucial group of people in modern society: knowledge workers. Rather than earning your living by the sweat of your brow, your work revolves around what you know and can learn, making you the owner of your means of production. This distinction was drawn by Peter Drucker, the prolific author who was often called the father of modern management, in the late 1950s. Your knowledge is portable and not dependent on any particular employer or industry, and you are not limited geographically in where you do your work.
Today, life as a knowledge worker is more challenging than ever. Drucker's life and thought anticipated exactly the “flat world” described in Thomas L. Friedman's book The World Is Flat of zero job security, information overload, and 24/7 work expectations. As technology and education are spread and democratized, more people in more places become competition for the work you do.
This book will guide you on a personal journey of considering life holistically, based on the teaching and personal example of Drucker, who lived a fulfilling and productive life until his death at ninety-five in 2005. When you live in a holistic manner, you take a broad, inclusive view of everything and everyone that is a part of your life. You literally “live in more than one world,” as Drucker told me during an interview before he died. That way, if you have setbacks in one area (particularly your work), you can bounce back more easily because you have other areas of strength and support.
This is particularly true in challenging economic times, with rampant unemployment, lost homes, and once-solid companies going bankrupt. If we place too much of our self-worth on a job that we lose, there is more damage than if we've built a strong support system and network.
The organizing theme of this book is creating and living a “total life” that includes your work, friends, family, professional colleagues, and affiliation groups. In this way, you can consider all of the elements of your life together and think of how each affects the others, now and in the future. To help accomplish this, you'll create and build a “Total Life List” as you read the book, or perhaps after you finish, if you're more comfortable doing it that way. Each chapter provides suggestions and background for working on your list. Your completed list (a living, changing document) will become one of the most valuable parts of your life, because it can tell you at a glance where you stand and where you'd like to go.
We'll consider both the advantages and, in some cases, the challenges or disadvantages of living a multidimensional life beyond the boundaries of your daily employment. The benefits of this type of life are that you can not only cushion the blows of setbacks such as the loss of a job or the bankruptcy of your company, but that you can meet and interact with people from other organizations and other walks of life. What you learn from these people and activities can be put to use in other areas of your life. Some possible disadvantages are that you may spread yourself too thin among your various activities and that you may find it difficult to find the time for the additional people in your life.
You will be given an uncomplicated framework and organizing principle for thinking about the benefits of living a total life and the challenges for today's knowledge worker. I am writing as a representative of that class of person. I worked as a librarian and researcher at USA Today for twenty-one years, until the final stages of this book. I also wrote for the Money section of USA Today for twelve years, and am a lecturer at the Catholic University of America's School of Library and Information Science. In the pages of this book, you'll consider life holistically in a way that goes beyond time management, career planning, or work-life balance.
You may wonder: “Wasn't Drucker known primarily as an author of books on management and as an adviser to Fortune 500 companies? Why is he relevant to my personal life?” Drucker also wrote about individual self-development and self-management. But these aspects of his thought are scattered across a number of his books and articles. In this book, I collect and synthesize his best lessons for knowledge workers into a logical structure. For you, the reader, this book is the self-help guide Drucker never wrote, and the next-best thing to being mentored by him.
Drucker's life can be a guide and inspiration for all knowledge workers. For many years, he carried out an interrelated, multidimensional life. He taught at a school named for him, The Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management at Claremont Graduate University, in Claremont, California. He wrote bestselling books for nearly seventy years. He was a highly sought consultant both to corporations such as General Electric and Procter & Gamble, as well as to nonprofits such as The American Red Cross and the Girl Scouts of the USA.
Personal Study of Peter Drucker
I began to study Peter Drucker's ideas seriously in 1986, when his 839-page tome Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices was assigned as the textbook for the management course I was taking at the Catholic University of America's School of Library and Information Science. That introduction launched my self-study of Drucker's work and of business and management books by other authors that continues to this day. I wrote about these books and interviewed authors for USA Today beginning in 1996, an undertaking that not only has been enjoyable, but also has provided me with an education in an important subject.
I interviewed and wrote about Drucker extensively for USA Today and other publications for more than a decade. In 2002, not long after interviewing him in Los Angeles for a feature story in USA Today, I decided to write a book on how knowledge workers could best apply his lessons for self-development and personal growth. It was an area of Drucker's work that I had long thought fascinating, yet that had not been thoroughly explored in books before, either by him or by other authors.
My research for this book included several interviews with Drucker and interviews with his former associates, such as colleagues, students, and consulting partners. My most important interview with Drucker was conducted on April 11, 2005, in Claremont, California, seven months to the day before he died. This interview—one of the last he gave—was videotaped. It is a revealing look at the wisdom of a ninety-five-year-old man who was still brimming with personal warmth and a sense of humor. You will have the opportunity to view the trailer of this interview on the Web at www.brucerosenstein.com, and I will continue to make presentations in as many cities as possible, based on both the book and the DVD.
I have also consulted material in the Drucker Archives at Claremont, and bring to this work the considerable background matter I have collected relating to Drucker and knowledge work for more than twenty years. You can now access much of the material I saw in person at the archives, which has been digitized and made available for free at www.druckerinstitute.com.
Chapter Overviews
Chapter 1, “Designing Your Total Life,” lays out the concept of living in more than one world, the idea of having a multidimensional life that is not overly dependent on any one component. You'll begin work on your personal Total Life List, and continue throughout the book (and ideally after that!). We will also look more closely at the concept of the knowledge worker, and learn more about Drucker's life.
Chapter 2, “Developing Your Core Competencies,” revolves around the idea of identifying and getting the most out of your personal areas of excellence. Although Drucker and others usually refer to this concept in the organizational sense, we will use it from the standpoint of the individual.
Chapter 3, “Creating Your Future,” looks at how parallel and second careers prepare you for further journeys in life. It begins with the following Drucker quotation: “The purpose of the work on making the future is not to decide what should be done tomorrow, but what should be done today to have a tomorrow.”
Chapter 4, “Exercising Your Generosity,” explores some specific ways that you can make a positive difference in the lives of other people, through a variety of activities. We'll examine possibilities in volunteerism, mentorship, nonprofit organizations, and social entrepreneurship.
Chapter 5, “Teaching and Learning,” revolves around the twin concepts at the heart of Drucker's success. He had a long-standing teaching career that was an integral part of his life. We'll look at your opportunities to become involved as a teacher, at the idea of continuous, lifelong learning—including Drucker's personal three-year self-study system—and also at the idea of learning how to learn.
The Conclusion, “Launching Your Journey,” wraps up your personal journey in reading the book and helps you consider the implications for your own life. You will have thought about what you want to add (and subtract) from your Total Life List, and you can think of as many ways as possible to use the list as a personal, ongoing guide for your own inspiration and transformation.
“Suggested Readings” is a brief section that guides you to some of Drucker's most important books, with an emphasis on what you can learn from each about personal and professional development.
The Organization of the Book
Within each chapter, each section begins with a quote from Drucker that sets the stage in his own words. These snippets may lead you to investigate more of his writing. An amplification and contextual discussion follows each quote. Where appropriate, there are suggestions about ways to take advantage of a particular concept and put it into practice. In a similar fashion, you will be shown possible disadvantages and challenges to carrying out a concept. Each chapter section has a sidebar titled “Ask Yourself,” with a couple of brief questions to get you thinking in a more personal way about the section topic, how it applies to you, and how it relates to your personal experience. Sidebars titled “Drucker's Life and Work” discuss how these concepts played out for Drucker himself.
Each chapter ends with a summary of the chapter's questions, a brief recap of the main points, and suggested activities that will help you build your own personal Total Life List. These activities are designed to get you thinking in a focused manner about your life both as it is now and where you'd like it to go. They provide a good complement to making the list, because they'll stimulate you to think about how you got to where you are in life and what you want for the future.
When you finish reading this book, you'll have learned not only how Peter Drucker lived a life of many dimensions, but how you can as well. Some readers will already be living along these lines, and the framework in these pages will help strengthen and deepen those dimensions, and aid you in making them connect with each other.
Drucker did not live long enough to see this book published. But I like to think that he would consider it to be a valuable extension of his legacy, and something of value for all knowledge workers. Perhaps, if he could magically read this now, he would reflect on what he taught and wrote, and how it continues to influence the lives of others, and consider that even he had learned something new.
Bruce Rosenstein
Rockville, Maryland, January 2009
