Jim Collins provides the Foreword to the 50th anniversary edition of Peter Drucker’s classic, The Effective Executive, a book first published in 1967. Consider this passage:

“Here are ten lessons I learned from Peter Drucker and this book, and that I offer as a small portal of entry into the mind of the greatest management thinker off all time.” These are the ten that Collins cites and then discusses:

1. First, manage thyself.
2. Do what you’re made for.
3. Work how you work best (and let others do the same).
4. Count your time, and make it count.
5. Prepare better meetings.
6. Don’t make a hundred decisions when one will do.
7. Find your one big distinctive impact.
8. Stop what you would not start.
9. Run lean.
10. Be useful.

“He was in the end, Collins adds, “the highest level of what a teacher can be: a role model of the very ideas he taught, a walking testament to his teachings in the tremendous lasting effect of his own life.”

Drucker always insisted on referring to himself as a “student” or “bystander.” With all due respect to his wishes, I have always viewed him as a pioneer who surveyed and defined dimensions of the business world that no one else had previously explored.

The 50th anniversary edition of Peter Drucker’s classic, The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done, will be published by HarperBusiness (January 24, 2017). You may also wish to check out The Peter F. Drucker Reader, also published this month by Harvard Business Review Press.