A Class with Drucker - Headway | Work on yourself

88 ■ A CLASS WITH DRUCKER
Now I would like to think that managers and executives do the right
thing, regardless of personal cost to them or to their careers. However, a
potential loss of job can also affect their families. It would be unreasonable
to expect that every executive, under all circumstances, would adopt
<strong>Drucker</strong>’s philosophy, even if they agreed <strong>with</strong> it completely. I realized that
there had to be some way of dispelling or at least dealing <strong>with</strong> this fear and
resolving these two opposing issues.
So I thought, well, why didn’t I have this fear? First, it was due to my
ignorance. My work experience had been almost entirely in the military.
However, now that I knew the truth, why was I still unafraid? The answer
was that I was still self-confident. But based on what? I finally realized that
my confidence came from my belief that first, I wouldn’t lose my job due
to incompetence. More importantly, I felt that if I did lose my job, I knew
how to get another. After all, in four years I had done this three times, <strong>with</strong>
successive increases in salary.
I eventually came up <strong>with</strong> the concept of writing a book for executives
that would lay out a specific plan for finding a new job. I reasoned that if
an executive was confident that he could find a new job, he would be much
less inclined to allow fear of job loss to affect his decisions as an executive.
My First Book
This reasoning process, and <strong>Drucker</strong>’s lecture, led directly to my writing
the book, The Executive’s Guide to Finding a Superior Job (AMACOM, 1978,
1983), which now is no longer in print, and because of the Internet, woefully
out of date. This was my first book, and one of my most successful.
That’s one reason that I “blame” Peter <strong>Drucker</strong> for what has happened
since I was his student. The book was an instant success and a best seller.
It got outstanding book reviews all over the country. The Chicago Tribune
was especially laudatory, saying words to the effect that this was different
than any other book of its type.
However, despite the book’s success, I caught a lot of flack from two
industries. The human resources folks were incensed because I advised readers
to bypass them and contact potential new bosses directly. I said, quite
truthfully, that human resources managers (or personnel managers, as they
were known then) had no authority to hire you unless you wanted to work
in human resources; they only had the authority to reject you and block you
from reaching the executive who did have the necessary authority to hire.