A Year with Peter Drucker - 52 Weeks of Coaching for Leadership Effectiveness

Week 15

Sustaining the Spirit of an Organization

Introduction

A primary objective of Drucker’s work on management is to create organizations with a high spirit of performance. All organizations draw from the same pool of prospective employees. They employ common people. To make common people perform at an uncommon level, then, can be done only in what Drucker calls the “moral realm.” Why? Because it requires that organizations overcome natural, ever-present entropic forces toward bureaucracy, deterioration, and decay.²⁹ And this requires one to submerge selfish interests to the welfare of the group.

After Rick Warren described how Saddleback Community Church grew to be very large, Drucker advised him of the need to introduce a disturbing ...