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In a world relentlessly moving toward new and different futureS
This site provides the elements
for creating a "life time" work approach
The Second Half of Your Life
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This is another TLN brainroad—a foundation for better second half decisions. (calendarize your plan for working on this?)
I don't know about you but the image below scares me. It is the lapsing back into middle-school social behavior that scares me. I want to end up somewhere different—maybe just dead.
From Management, Revised Edition: Preface by Peter Drucker
… But while the life expectancy of the individual and especially the individual knowledge worker has risen beyond anything anybody could have foretold at the beginning of the twentieth century, the life expectancy of the employing institution has been going down, and is likely to keep going down.
Or rather, the number of years has been shrinking during which an employing institution—and especially a business enterprise—can expect to stay successful.
This period was never very long.
Historically, very few businesses were successful for as long as thirty years in a row.
To be sure, not all businesses ceased to exist when they ceased to do well.
But the ones that survived beyond thirty years usually entered into a long period of stagnation—and only rarely did they turn around again and once more become successful growth businesses.
… snip, snip …
Thus, while the life expectancies and especially the working-life expectancies of the individual and especially of the knowledge worker have been expanding very rapidly, the life expectancy of the employing organizations has actually been going down.
And—in a period of very rapid technological change, of increasing competition because of globalization, of tremendous innovation—the successful life-expectancies of employing institutions are almost certain to continue to go down.
More and more people, and especially knowledge workers, can therefore expect to outlive their employing organizations and to have to be prepared to develop new careers, new skills, new social identities, new relationships, for the second half of their lives. (calendarize this)
See Managing Oneself and consider starting early—very early. It has a section devoted to the second half of your life.
Good intentions: the road to hell
The mistake most people make when they move into the second half is to rely on good intentions
According to Peter, good intentions ("I want to do something significant") is only a starting point.
The goal is results and performance that fulfills a clearly stated mission—something that needs doing—something that creates value for a customer (something that is important to them as human beings—not the typical marketing BS).
Peter told me over and over, "All results are on the outside.
On the inside is only cost and effort."
… Another phrase I heard over and over in virtually every conversation with Peter has shaped my thinking: From good intentions to results and performance."
Peter contended that most nonprofit organizations, almost all big foundations, and a good deal of government spending are invested in "good intentions."
In his typically brusque style, he once told me, "Tell your rich friends money has no results
If money were what made the difference, Egypt would be Japan."
Peter wasn't speaking against money.
He was simply saying that money alone won't get results.
It might even impede results.
The Five Most Important Questions You Will Ever Ask About Your Organization by Peter Drucker
See "Its Profits Us to Strengthen Nonprofits" in Managing in a Time of Great Change
Career / life vision guidance from Peter Drucker — extremely, extremely, extremely valuable attention-directing concepts and ideas from a long-term standpoint.
Conceptual Landscapes to Explore and Harvest
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Living in more than one world : how Peter Drucker's wisdom can inspire your life by Bruce Rosenstein
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Halftime: Changing Your Game Plan from Success to Significance
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Finishing Well: How Pathfinders Transform Success to Significance.
Be sure to see Ten Principles for Life II (Great advice drawn from three interviews with Peter Drucker) at the bottom of the page—calendarize this. -
Game Plan (A personal guide for implementing the principles of "Halftime," and thus making the journey from success to significance)
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Stuck in Halftime (a lot of people never successfully exit)
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Mojo: How to Get It, How to Keep It, How to Get It Back if You Lose It
Useful Resources
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Post-Capitalist Society (Chapter on Citizenship Through the Social Sector)
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Choosing your non-profit organization (social sector) affiliations
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Managing the Nonprofit Organization by Peter Drucker. "Part Five: Developing Yourself: as a person, as an executive, as a leader" also deals with the second half
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The Five Most Important Questions You Will Ever Ask About Your Organization by Peter Drucker
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Called to Serve: Creating and Nurturing the Effective Volunteer Board
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Look through the topics in the contents of Peter Drucker's work
The Role of the Social Sector
Most people think of Peter Drucker as the "father of modern management," which he was (though he was never very comfortable with that description).
And while it's true that most of the very successful corporations owe a lot of their success to him, Peter increasingly turned his attention to the social sector—nonprofit organizations whose role is to look after the social needs of a culture.
Peter felt strongly that while government has a critical role to play as policy maker, standard setter, and paymaster, it should not attempt to run social services because it has proven to be almost totally incompetent in that area.
He also believed it was not a primary role of business to provide for the social needs of citizens.
Instead, nonprofit agencies—of which more than fifty percent are churches and faith—based organizations—have the greatest potential for doing the greatest good.
But as Peter would often say, "Don't mistake potential for performance," and devoted a great deal of his time helping the social sector, including churches, becoming more effective by becoming better managers.
I know that some have criticized larger churches for becoming more "businesslike" by adopting modern management principles, but Peter was adamant that the function of management is to make the church more churchlike (or a hospital more hospital-like), not make it more businesslike.
(calendarize this?)
He saw such huge potential within churches to care for the social needs of the nation (see chapter titled "Citizenship Through the Social Sector" in Post-Capitalist Society) , especially within the ranks of Baby Boomers who will be looking for more meaningful options to retirement.From Halftime by Bob Buford
Managing Service Institutions in the Society of Organizations
From Chapter 12 of Management, Revised Edition
Amazon Links: Management Rev Ed
and Management Cases, Revised Edition
Business enterprise is only one of the institutions of modern society, and business managers are by no means our only managers.
Service institutions are equally institutions and, therefore, equally in need of management.
Some of the most familiar of these institutions are government agencies, the armed services, schools, colleges, universities, research laboratories, hospitals and other health-care institutions, unions, professional practices such as the large law firm, and professional, industry, and trade associations.
They all have people who are paid for doing the management job, even though they may be called administrators, commanders, directors, or executives, rather than managers.
The Multi-Institutional Society
Public-service institutions are supported by the economic surplus produced by economic activity.
They are social overhead.
The growth of the public service institution in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is the best testimonial to the success of business in discharging its economic task—producing economic surplus.
Yet, unlike the early nineteenth-century university, the service institutions are not a luxury or an ornament.
They are essentials of a modern society.
They have to perform if society and business are to function.
These service institutions are the main expense of a modern society.
Approximately half of the gross national product of the United States (and of most of the other developed countries) is spent on public-service institutions.
Every citizen in the developed, industrialized, urbanized societies depends for survival on the performance of the public-service institutions.
These institutions also embody the values of developed societies.
Education, health care, knowledge, and mobility—not just more food, clothing, and shelter—are the fruits of our society's increased economic capacities and productivity.
Yet the evidence for performance in the service institutions is not impressive, let alone overwhelming.
Colleges, hospitals, and universities have grown larger than an earlier generation would have dreamed possible.
Their budgets have grown even faster.
Yet everywhere they are in crisis.
A generation or two ago their performance was taken for granted.
Today they are attacked on all sides for lack of performance.
Services that the nineteenth century managed successfully with little apparent effort—the postal service, for instance, or the railroads—are today deep in the red and require enormous subsidies.
National and local government agencies are constantly being reorganized for efficiency.
Yet in every country citizens complain loudly of growing bureaucracy in government.
What they mean is that the government agency is being run more for the convenience of its employees than for contribution and performance.
This is mismanagement.
Are Service Institutions Managed?
The service institutions themselves have become "management conscious."
Increasingly they turn to business to learn management.
In all service institutions, manager development, management by objectives, and many other concepts and tools of business management are now common.
This is a healthy sign, but it does not mean that the service institutions understand the problems of managing themselves.
It only means that they begin to realize that at present they are not being managed.
But Are They Manageable?
There is another and very different response to the performance crisis of the service institutions.
A growing number of critics have come to the conclusion that service institutions are inherently unmanageable and incapable of performance.
Some go so far as to suggest that they should, therefor, be dissolved.
But there is not the slightest evidence that today's society is willing to do without the contributions the service institutions provide.
The people who most vocally attack the shortcomings of the hospitals want more and better health care.
Those who criticize public schools want better, not less, education.
The voters bitterest about government bureaucracy vote for more government programs.
We have no choice but to learn to manage the public-service institutions for performance.
And they can be managed for performance.
Managing Public-Service Institutions For Performance
Different classes of service institutions need different structures.
But all of them need first to impose on themselves discipline of the kind imposed by leaders of the institutions in the examples in the previous chapters.This work involves
attention-directing and
mental patterns
They need to define "what our business is and what it should be."
See "The Theory of the Business" in chapter 8 of Management, Revised Edition and The Five Most Important Questions You Will Ever Ask About Your Organization (converts intentions into action)
They should perhaps even work out some balance between the different and conflicting definitions of mission (as did the presidents of the emerging American universities—see later in this chapter).
That is, they must build self-control by results into their system.
They need to identify unsatisfactory performance and activities that are outdated or unproductive, or both.
And they need a mechanism for dropping such activities rather than wasting money and human energies where the results are poor.
The last requirement may be the most important one.
Without a market test, the service institution lacks the built-in discipline that forces a business eventually to abandon yesterday—or else go bankrupt.
Assessing and abandoning low-performance activities in service institutions, outside and inside business, would be the most painful but also the most beneficial improvement.
As the examples have shown, no success is "forever."
Yet it is even more difficult to abandon yesterday's success than it is to reappraise a failure.
A once-successful project gains an air of success that outlasts the project's real usefulness and disguises its failings.
In a service institution particularly, yesterday's success becomes "policy," "virtue," "conviction," if not holy writ.
The institution must impose on itself the discipline of thinking through its mission, its objectives, and its priorities, and of building in feedback control from results and performance on policies, priorities, and action.
Otherwise, it will gradually become less and less effective.
We are in such a welfare mess today in the United States largely because the welfare program of the 1930s was such a success.
We could not abandon it and, instead, misapplied it to the radically different problem of the inner-city poor.
To make service institutions perform, it should by now be clear, does not require great leaders.
It requires a system.
The essentials of this system are not too different from the essentials of performance in a business enterprise, but the application will be quite different.
The service institutions are not businesses; performance means something quite different in them.
The applications of the essentials differ greatly for different service institutions.
As our later examples will show, there are at least three different kinds of service institutions—institutions that are not paid for performance and results, but for efforts and programs.
Also see "What Results Should You Expect?: A User's Guide to MBO" in Toward The Next Economics
What are the opportunities time and history have (will) put within your grasp? — Peter Drucker
for topics or phrases.
