Peter Drucker’s Unique Approach to Management Breaking the Shackles of Time

In this episode, Bernard Jaworski, the Drucker Chair in Management and the Liberal Arts at CGU, visits the podcast to discuss the discipline of management as well as some of the key ideas of Peter Drucker. We discuss what makes the Drucker School of Management unique in its approach to business education and the role of business in social change, amongst other topics.
Episode Transctipt:
Marcus Weakley:
Welcome to Episode Six of Breaking the Shackles of Time. I’m Marcus Weakley, the host of the podcast. I’m joined today by Bernie Jaworski, the Drucker Chair in Management and the Liberal Arts at the Drucker School of Management at Claremont Graduate University. This position, this chair is named in honor of Peter Drucker, the founder of modern management. It is awarded to an internationally recognized scholar who carries on the Drucker legacy of tempering sound business practices with a commitment to social responsibility.
Marcus Weakley:
Jaworski comes to the Drucker School from the Switzerland-based IMD. Prior to that, he spent a decade as a senior partner of the Monitor Group, a global management consulting firm. During his Monitor career, he co-founded and co-lead two of the global practice areas, the e-commerce practice and the executive education unit. In addition, he served as a tenured full professor of marketing at the University of Southern California, faculty at the University of Arizona and a visiting professor at Harvard Business. Thank you so much for joining us. I’m very happy that you’ve agreed to jump into the podcast and talk about management with us here today.
Bernie Jaworski:
Very excited to be here, Marcus. Thank you very much for the invite. I’m always happy to talk about the work of Peter Drucker, right? I’ve consumed the Kool-Aid, if you will. So, I’m very happy to be the vessel that explain some of his basic ideas to a broader audience. So, thank you for my inviting me.
Marcus Weakley:
Nice. Great. Well, let’s start even one step further back and then we’ll hone in on Peter Drucker, but what I’m interested in is for folks who don’t really have an idea about why you would go to school to study management, instead of just maybe just running a business type of thing, what exactly does it mean to study management? What are some of the major methods and approaches of the field? Why does one get an MBA?
Bernie Jaworski:
Yeah, that’s a great question. As I thought about that question, there’s two ways to answer. One is around a philosophy. The second is around tools and methods. So, from a philosophy perspective, I tend to think of management as having three different orientations, three different schools of thought, much like you’d find a school of thought in psychology or sociology. So, the schools of thought that I think exists near management are one is taking a shareholder-only perspective that it’s all about profit. It’s all about economics. It’s all about supply and demand, let free markets operate. That’s coming from what’s called the Chicago School of Economics, and Milton Friedman being probably the most important person in that space.
Bernie Jaworski:
The second school of thought is purpose-, values-led companies. You see a lot of this in the last 20 years with people, particularly young folks in their 20s, want to join a company that has a purpose that has values as orientation. They’re buying into the overall mission and purpose of that company. Now, they obviously want to make money. They want to make good economic returns, but in addition, they think their mission is broader than that.
Bernie Jaworski:
And then this third school of thought, which is the Drucker school of thought is that all the reason we’re doing all of this management is not simply to allow your organization to function well and produce economic returns. You want to have an impact on society in general