A Class with Drucker - Headway | Work on yourself

A MODEL ORGANIZATION ■ 175
In class, Peter had told us the basis of modern business structure
came from the military and from the Catholic Church. That is, both had
hierarchies and forms of organization that were copied almost exactly by
business. In addition to his occasional use of examples from the military,
he stated that the U.S. military had the fairest system of promotion of
any large organization. According to <strong>Drucker</strong>, this was because the system
minimized favoritism, nepotism, and other elements which discouraged
promoting the best. To many of my younger classmates who had
not been in the military, this was a startling statement. Most of them had
matured during the Vietnam era. They had been brought up <strong>with</strong> the
notion that the military was inflexible, unfair, operated on the brutish of
principles, and was peopled <strong>with</strong> individuals of lower intelligence at all
levels. Only in recent years and since the first Gulf War has this feeling
somewhat abated.
Much later on <strong>Drucker</strong>’s beliefs regarding military management got
more publicity. This occurred mainly from Frances Hesselbein’s book,
Hesselbein on Leadership (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2002), and in Be,
Know, Do (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004), a book Frances adapted
from the official Army Leadership Manual and which was developed by
the Leader-to-Leader Institute (formerly the <strong>Drucker</strong> Foundation), of
which Frances is the chairman. Frances Hesselbein became a close friend
of Peter’s. In fact, Peter said that she could be a successful CEO of any
company in the country, although her background is mostly nonprofit.
She is one of the few management experts to notice the similarity
between ethical leadership in what Peter taught and leadership as
taught by our military services.
For the first time, the extent to which <strong>Drucker</strong> both understood and
approved of the military’s unique mastery of management was publicized
and documented. For example, in recommending the Leader-to-Leader
Institute’s adaptation of the Army Leadership Manual, <strong>Drucker</strong> was quoted
as saying: “The Army trains and develops more leaders than do all other
institutions together—and <strong>with</strong> a lower casualty rate.” Note that <strong>Drucker</strong>
said “the Army.” The book he was recommending was from an Army manual
on leadership. He did not mean by his statement to disparage or put
down any of our other armed services. From our conversations, I knew
that he could have easily substituted any of the others, since all operate
very similarly in training, leadership, and other aspects of management.