A Class with Drucker - Headway | Work on yourself

72 ■ A CLASS WITH DRUCKER
■ If you were the corporate attorney, what actions should you take,
given your lack of functional business knowledge and experience?
■ How can senior corporate managers of any background best prepare
themselves for general management responsibilities?
After giving us time to read the case and jot down our ideas, Peter led
us into a discussion regarding the generalist versus the specialist as a successful
top executive. Some of the class supported the view that the traditional
functional areas were the only way to reach the top. However,
Peter clearly felt that the traditional functional tracks to the top should
be secondary to two other important elements in an executive’s background:
past proven success and personal readiness for the job. Peter
emphasized that any manager’s preparation for a top job was the responsibility
of the individual executive. Looking at me meaningfully, he
added, “Without this preparation, one should not venture into unfamiliar
areas unless there is no alternative.” Without pause, he then launched
into what I believe was an allegorical story regarding a type of preparation
he envisioned as effective.
The Secret Life of a Top Executive
I was often amazed that <strong>Drucker</strong> could so easily transition from a lecture
on one topic to suddenly come forth <strong>with</strong> an absolute gem on an entirely
different topic which sometimes appeared only tenuously connected to his
original subject. In some cases, he might lecture for an hour on various
topics which appeared not at all to be connected to what he was lecturing
about when he began. He might do this in answer to a question, but at
times it appeared that no special stimulus at all was required. However, if
you paid close attention to these different mini-lectures, and even the lectures
<strong>with</strong>in a lecture, everything would become clear. He would tie it all
together, and you understood that he felt that you needed to understand
all of this extra material to get the basic point or understand his answer to
a question that a student asked.
Everything <strong>Drucker</strong> said had value. I have frequently tried to go over
Peter’s lectures in my mind to find some unimportant trivia or something
that I could immediately dismiss or disregard. I was never able to do it. Yet
his lectures ranged widely. I learned to eagerly await these sudden appearances
of unexpected lessons, and I suspect others did as well.