A Class with Drucker - Headway | Work on yourself

BASE YOUR STRATEGY ON THE SITUATION ■ 209
are derived from only 20 percent of the effort—a crucial comment on the
proper allocation of always-limited resources. I tried to relate what resulted
in these successes to what might prove successful in modern business.
I wish I had been able to conduct my research on an ongoing basis, but
other projects kept cropping up which forced me to drop this work temporarily
and to do something else.
At first I identified several hundred principles of strategy. However, many
were repetitive. I finally whittled this list to only fourteen principles of the
original group which I thought were completely nonrepetitive. I extended
the results of my research to other endeavors. I actually did some research
including office politics, sports, and even romance. I was surprised, but the
principles endured in many different areas of human endeavor.
I didn’t share this research <strong>with</strong> Peter at the time. I thought that I’d better
get it all together before approaching him. Also it looked like I had a way
to go. Some of my fourteen principles were too specific to certain situations.
Others needed to be reworked for clarity and emphasis. Eventually, I
refined my original list again, this time to ten essential principles. I was
pretty proud of myself. They were the distillation from the thinking of the
greatest strategists who have ever lived in many areas of human activity, and
in my opinion, they were applicable across the board to all areas on human
endeavor, including, of course, business.
I saw Peter at Claremont after concluding this research at a conference
held there in the spring of 2004. I had told him about my work sometime
previously. I had hoped to speak <strong>with</strong> him at the conference as it was almost
done, but I did not get the opportunity. He had stopped teaching, and his
colleagues told me that he was clearing out his garage and getting his
papers in order and turning them over to the university.
For various reasons, including both of our schedules and his declining
health, I did not get an opportunity to share these strategy principles <strong>with</strong>
him before publication of them as The Art of the Strategist (AMACOM,
2004). So I cannot say whether he would have agreed <strong>with</strong> them or
whether he would have recognized them as those principles that had been
drivers in his thinking. I did have a number of CEOs and others review
them and comment. I believe they are the essential principles of strategy,
but I cannot claim them to be <strong>Drucker</strong>’s principles of strategy. Still, as was
pointed out at his memorial service after his death, we, his former students,
are all Peter’s “apprentices.” So, from one of many apprentices, here
is what I came up <strong>with</strong>.