A Class with Drucker - Headway | Work on yourself

HOW I BECAME THE STUDENT ■ 3
return to the U.S., I had become director of research and development for
a company developing and manufacturing life support equipment, primarily
for aviators and airplane passengers. This company was located in
California, near Los Angeles. As a practicing manager, I decided that I had
better learn something about business, so I committed to reading at least
one business book every week.
I soon discovered <strong>Drucker</strong>. I read his classic works such as Concept of
the Corporation and The Effective Executive. His book, Management: Tasks,
Responsibilities, Practices, was published the same year as I began as an
executive in industry, and I eagerly devoured the thick volume that I
would later study as his student.
My First <strong>Drucker</strong> Lesson was Not from the <strong>Class</strong>room
I received my first <strong>Drucker</strong> lesson before I even met Peter <strong>Drucker</strong>. As
the senior manager heading up research and development, I attended
the company’s annual off-site sales conference. One of the items on the
agenda was a discussion of a <strong>Drucker</strong> concept developed in Management:
Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices. In this book Peter had written
that “the first task of any business management was to decide what
business it was in.” I soon realized that it was not only a profound statement
about business: it was true about every endeavor anyone might
undertake in life.
Let me explain what I mean. I had at that point recently completed
my first-ever job search. A few years later I became a headhunter. Both
as a job seeker myself and as a facilitator in this field, I discovered that
many job candidates fail to get hired by companies because they don’t
know what they want to do. They want “to keep their options open.”
Even some managers who have extensive experience in many industries
make this mistake. They put together a very general resume which says
that they have done many different things in many different areas and for
different companies. They promote themselves as a “jack of all trades,”
able to do anything. Unfortunately, their resumes do not emphasize what
“business” they are really in. This comes across as the second part of
that old saying “. . . and master of none.”
As a consequence, not infrequently, a job candidate <strong>with</strong> a lot less
experience who makes it clear by the way his or her experience is presented
that this is the one “business” that the person is really in, is the