In A Year with Peter Drucker: 52 Weeks of Coaching for Leadership Effectiveness, Joseph A. Maciariello provides the thematic equivalent of a calendar year of personal supervision by Peter Drucker to each person who reads this book. He is now doing for many what Drucker did only for a Few. Peter Drucker mentored numerous people especially during his last 20 years. The results have been impressive. This project seeks to document this successful mentoring process using unpublished work and extend its usefulness to others with a particular emphasis on 20-30 year olds, members of the millennial generation. Now everyone who reads this book can be mentored by some who is widely regarded as “the world’s greatest authority on management,” a designation that Drucker despised.

Here is Drucker’s advice on how to set one’s sights on what is important, not on what is urgent.

1. “Make the important rather than the urgent your priority in all dimensions of your life.” (Page 45)

Of course, Drucker realized that there are developments that can be both important and urgent.

2. “”Effective leaders I have met…did not start out with the question, ‘What do I want?’ They started out with the question, ‘What needs to be done?‘” (48)

The most effective people are those who are results-driven, especially when a question needs to be answered or a problem needs to be solved.

3. “The best proof that the danger of overpruning [eliminating urgent activities] is a bugaboo is the extraordinary effectiveness so often attained by severely ill or severely handicapped people.” (48)

See Point #1.

4. “A manager must, so to speak, keep his nose to the grindstone while lifting his eyes to the hills — quite an acrobatic feat! (On the need to harmonize decisions affecting the short term and the long term.) Page 53

For example, it helps to see what a Jackson Pollock painting looks like before attempting to piece together a puzzle based on it. After removing the pieces and spreading them out, keep the box near at hand.

5. “So we start always with the long range, and then we feed back and say, What do we do today?” (55)

After President Anwar Sadat of Egypt and Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel reached peace accords at Camp David (in 1978 ) after thousands of years of bloodshed between their countries, they were asked how they accomplished that. Begin replied, “We did what all wise men do. We began at the end.”

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To learn more about Peter Drucker, please click here.

To learn more about Joe Maciariello, please click here.