A Class with Drucker - Headway | Work on yourself

WHAT EVERYBODY KNOWS IS FREQUENTLY WRONG ■ 23
boss preferred, even though ‘everyone knows’ that continual consultation
<strong>with</strong> a higher manager is less desirable.”
<strong>Drucker</strong> was right, and I should have known better. I was in the
process of losing the confidence of my then boss by behaving exactly like
the executive who operated independently. That in itself is an important
lesson, but the idea that what everyone knows is frequently wrong proved
even more important to me, and I think many other of <strong>Drucker</strong>’s students.
Over the next few years, I heard Peter say this quite a few times.
Maybe through repetition I finally began to think more deeply about
what the words really meant. This seemingly simple and self-contradicting
statement is amazingly true and immensely valuable, and not only in
business. What <strong>Drucker</strong> wanted to emphasize was that we must always
question our assumptions no matter from where they originate. This is
especially true regarding anything that a majority of people “know” or
assume <strong>with</strong>out questioning. This “knowledge” should always be suspect
and needs to be examined much more closely. In a surprisingly high percentage
of cases, the information “known to be true” will turn out to be
false or inaccurate, if not generally, then in a specific instance. This can
lead to extremely poor, even disastrous management decisions.
Things Once “Known to Be True” Are Now Known to Be False
Of course there are many old “truisms” once thought by everyone to
be true which we laugh at today. “The world is flat.” “The earth is the
center of the universe.” The ancient Greeks knew that everything was
made up of only four elements: earth, air, fire, and water. Of course, in
modern times we learned that they were mistaken. When I took chemistry
in high school, I learned that a Periodic Table of Elements had
been formulated by a fellow named Mendeleev and that it had been
established that there were exactly 93 elements, no more, no less. We
got an “A” if we could name them all. Today, there are 102 elements—
or so “everybody knows.”
Questions Raised by 100 Percent Agreement
Interestingly, <strong>Drucker</strong>’s lesson goes back over the millennia. In ancient
Israel, the highest court was called the Sanhedrin. It corresponded roughly
to the U.S. Supreme Court today, although it had a lot more power. The
Sanhedrin tried the most important cases, and it had the power to exact