Books extolling Peter Drucker, the so-called "father of modern management," still stream out of major publishing houses at the rate of about one every three months. The latest is "A Class with Drucker: The Lost Lessons of the World's Greatest Management Teacher," written by William A. Cohen, the master's former star student at Claremont University.
In an amazing coincidence of common sense, a rare commodity in many enterprises, Drucker's management principles emphasized in Cohen's new book often coincide with the real-life practices of acclaimed baseball manager Tommy Lasorda, as explained in his new book, "I Live for This." Given his lack of formal education after high school, it is safe to assume Lasorda never studied or ever heard of Drucker.
Examples of their being on the same management page:
Cohen points out that Drucker practiced a policy of "relating anecdotes that later prove to be less than accurate in order to illustrate a point, so long as the point is absolutely true and immensely powerful." Lasorda once got his Los Angeles Dodgers out of a losing streak by telling them that even the great "Murderer's Row" New York Yankees of 1927 once lost nine games in a row and still became the greatest team in baseball history. Though not true, the story inspired the team to believe it could turn things around, and none of the ballplayers checked their manager on his facts.
Cohen quotes Drucker on the necessity of a leader's having a positive mental attitude, "One cannot be negative and succeed in anything." Lasorda says the same thing a different way, "I go to the ballpark with a smile, no matter how I feel, because my team gets its mood from me. If I ain't happy, they ain't happy, and if they ain't happy, they ain't winning. As a kid, I remember reading on a milk can 'Contented cows give better milk.' I've always believed that applies as well to people."
- Drucker believed in doing the unexpected to keep one's competition off balance. Cohen remembers his teacher telling how Sony created an unpleasant surprise for its competitors by using the transistor as the means for building a portable radio, knowing that the leading American electronics firms believed the transistor could not be commercialized, and had, therefore, dedicated themselves to developing a vacuum tube radio. Lasorda did the same, responding to those who said "You can't do that!" by proving he could, using suicide squeeze bunt plays more than any manager in history, and having base runners tag up and score from third base on a pop-up in ballparks with expansive foul territories.
- In describing the most important aspect of motivating workers, Drucker's mantra was "treat everyone with respect." Lasorda's approach puts meat on the concept's bones -- never allowing a player who made a critical error to sit alone on the bus ride back to the hotel, learning the names of his ballplayers' children and insisting they call him "Uncle Tommy," and becoming the first manager to make a practice of hugging his players. "If you treat a player like a human being, he'll play like Superman. ... What good does it do to criticize someone after he's made a bad throw? ... It's amazing what a player will do if he thinks he's being trusted."
Good management is as good management does, whether studying the ideas of Drucker or the practices of Lasorda. Though Drucker passed away in 2005, Lasorda is still going strong and will speak at 7 p.m. on Jan. 8 at the Dallas Museum of Nature & Science's IMAX theater, as part of the touring "Baseball as America" exhibit. If interested in attending, contact lpowell@natureandscience.org.
Leave a comment