Peter Drucker and Marvin Bower

I learnt more from Peter Drucker during my years at Claremont than from anyone else except my father. Peter was my teacher, mentor and guide. At the age of 90 he used to speak non-stop for two to three hours and at that ripe age his memory was sharper than mine. In one of his lectures he mentioned reverently about Marvin Bower, who established the profession of management consulting. Peter and Marvin had worked closely. Peter had been a foremost management consultant and Marvin was the de facto founder and builder of McKinsey & Company. Peter had helped Marvin in setting up management practices at McKinsey.

Working with Marvin, Peter had noted that one of the key reasons of business failure was not wrong answers to right questions but right answers to wrong questions and Peter drilled that into us through myriad examples from his long career in management consulting. Problem formulation was more important than finding the right solution. Problem could only be formulated if there was an acute emphasis on collection of facts. Facts could never be collected accurately if information within a business was distorted by deference to hierarchy. Peter and Marvin had seen that frontline employees were scared to present the facts to their bosses, when those facts were in contradiction with what their bosses wanted to hear. This was one of the reasons Peter and Marvin encouraged flattening of the organizations, candor, informality and broad understanding of reality from multiple perspectives. Both of them put the interest of the client above their own personal interests and exhorted others to do the same. This required that the goals of a business could not be financial. Financial success was an outcome of the client success. They believed that business success and sustainability was based on organization's competence in regenerating leadership internally. Therefore, continuous investment in people was one of their core beliefs. Two of the firms most influenced by their thoughts, viz., McKinsey and GE are leadership factories today. Peter and Marvin understood that maintaining success was hard, since success created its own hubris and what caused success in the past might not be what would create success in future. Therefore, there was a need to develop an aversion to complacency within organization, which could be developed when there was openness and lack of defensiveness.

I listened to Peter for four years at Claremont Graduate University. His voice and the sentences that he uttered still ring in my years. In my own career I have seen validation of Peter's teachings umpteen times. These are the words that have helped me practice the discipline that Peter so diligently taught.