A Class with Drucker - Headway | Work on yourself

YOU MUST KNOW YOUR PEOPLE TO LEAD THEM ■ 149
all the more amazing because my wife is an Israeli and her Hebrew name,
Nurit, is not exactly a common name <strong>with</strong> which <strong>Drucker</strong> would have
been familiar.
A General Does Even Better
I told this story about Peter’s phenomenal memory of his students to a
group of senior military people once, and someone topped it. He told me
that when he attended National War College in Washington D.C., the
commandant, the War College’s equivalent of a campus president, was a
major general in the Marines.
Like Claremont, the school year began <strong>with</strong> a party for the new class
and their spouses. There was no second party as the course was only a
year long. He said that when each officer and his spouse entered they
were greeted by a receiving line consisting only of the commandant and
his wife. In the military, that itself was unusual. The modus operandi is
for a receiving line in which an aide is the first to greet the guests. The
aide takes the names of the military member and his spouse and introduces
them to the senior officer. The senior officer then introduces the
couple to his or her own spouse. In this case, there was no aide to first
hear the names of each couple.
The commandant had met few of the hundred or so officers from all
branches of the armed forces in the new class previously, and probably
none of their spouses. Yet he amazed each couple by addressing them by
their correct first and last names and introducing them correctly to his
wife. Moreover, according to the senior officer telling me the story, the
general seemed to know about their children and their off-duty activities
and interests. His new students were dumbfounded. When occasionally
asked by someone how he knew so much about them, he would only smile
and say, “A good commander makes it his business to know those for
whose well-being he is responsible.”
Now I have heard of professional memory experts being able to do things
like this, but never anyone else, much less a military commander. The general’s
students thought he was beyond having a photographic memory—that
he had to be some kind of a psychic. The social talk that night at the party
was about the commandant and his remarkable performance.
The next day the general addressed the entire class as a group for the
first time. He explained the mystery of how he was able to know not only