10 Peter Drucker quotes to celebrate his centennial

Photo: Taxi - Rear Window by pixonomy(Flickr)

Peter Drucker was born 100 years ago this Thursday in Vienna, Austria. He was a pioneer in social and management theory, a prolific writer of books and articles and a good source of quotes, many of which are still relevant today. Here are ten that resonate with me:

1. The purpose of a business is to create a customer
2. Business has two functions: marketing and innovation
   
3. Trying to predict the future is like trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights while looking out the back window
   
4. The best way to predict the future is to create it.
5. The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself
6. Suppliers and especially manufacturers have market power because they have information about a product or a service that the customer does not and cannot have, and does not need if he can trust the brand. This explains the profitability of brands.
7. Most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their work done.
8. Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things
9. There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all
   
10. Company cultures are like country cultures. Never try to change one. Try, instead, to work with what you've got.

Big lips, big hips & other signs of luxury branding

Ryan Murphy, creator of Nip/Tuck, talking to Terry Gross on Fresh Air about the waning interest in Hollywood for breast implants and those "big, over-inflated, horrible lips:"

"I think that the culture has turned against that look...Plastic surgery, in its day, was sort of seen as a luxury item and a status symbol but now it's so affordable and it's so cheap and anybody can get it--you can get it at a strip mall--that it's no longer, I think, like wearing the new Chanel sweater or carrying the new Dior bag. It's taken on a different, tacky vibe."

Which reminded me, for some reason, of an evening meal in the South of France, many years ago. A meal presided over by the chef de famille, a man of huge girth, entertaining his and our family. His size, I was told, corresponded to his status. Today obesity has also taken on a different vibe and is no longer seen as an indicator of wealth. Even further back in time, aristocratic Elizabethans used lead paint as a face-whitening make-up to distinguish themselves from those who had to work outdoors.

So, there's a long history of people going to extraordinary and sometimes painful lengths to differentiate themselves from the hoi polloi. Buying luxury goods may be less painful but the same principles apply. As Seth Godin says in a recent post:

"Luxury goods are needlessly expensive. By needlessly, I mean that the price is not related to performance. The price is related to scarcity, brand and storytelling. Luxury goods are organized waste. They say, 'I can afford to spend money without regard for intrinsic value.' That doesn't mean they are senseless expenditures. Sending a signal is valuable if that signal is important to you."

For luxury, inaccessibility for average folk is the first ingredient for success. Lose that and you lose the whole point.

Why are so few companies the hotbeds of innovation that everyone thinks they should be?

Andrew Campbell, from the Ashridge Strategic Management Centre in London, asks an important question: Why is it, given that we've known for years that the key ingredients of innovation and creativity management are collaboration, encouraging diverse perspectives, nurturing ideas etc, that so few companies adopt these practices?

His answer: "What we don't understand is that innovation and creativity are value-destroying activities unless they are carefully contained. There are many more bad ideas than good ones and many more people who are passionate about ill-conceived business models than about those that will succeed. Give all that creativity a free hand, and you will get poorer--fast."

Agree? Does creativity typically destroy value and, if so, what is realistic expectation for creative processes to thrive in profit-driven corporations?

Source: The letters section of the March Harvard Business Review (subscription required)

Quote of the Day: Getting people to follow

Photo: Enzo Molinari (Flickr)

Is this going to be a thing? I don't know. But, like last week, I have a quote from an interview on NPR's Fresh Air (which I don't even listen to that often).

This time it's Philip Seymour Hoffman, Oscar-nominated for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in Doubt. (He lost but, in attending the event in a beanie hat, developed a new fan base.) In this part of the interview, he's talking about his preparation for Capote, the movie where he did win an Oscar.

He's explaining the challenge he faced with Truman Capote's voice because it was so different from his own. He knew he didn't have to have a perfect impersonation but that he had to get close enough to get people to follow or buy in to his performance. Transcribed as accurately as I can:

"I just started training in a way--to get as close as I could a sense of his behavior, you know, because all you've got to do is really get close enough--to get a sense of something and the people, if they get a sense of something and that there is real acting going on, they'll give over--they want to give over because what they are watching is true. The impersonation is really not interesting anymore. It's really about your belief in the circumstances of this character and what they are going through and that you buy that story and that character's journey. As long as what you are doing is honest. So that was just me doing the best I could to facilitate that transfer of belief, that leap of faith for everybody in the audience."

So, last week, Joss Whedon was saying that the essence of art was to create something that has the ability to touch everybody but does it differently for every person. And this week, Hoffman talks about doing just enough to let people make a leap of faith and "give over." I feel I'm just this close to connecting these thoughts together, linking them to branding and saying something profound. But not quite. Any helpers?

Quote of the Day: The BYO Subtext

Joss Whedon is the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the much-praised online music-comedy Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, starring Neil Patrick Harris as an aspiring super-villain.

In an interview on NPR's Fresh Air to promote his new show Dollhouse, he made the following observation about the byo subtext that is at the heart of art (transcribed as accurately as I can):

"It's got to touch everybody in a way that's totally personal. I think the problem with a lot of mass art, a lot of, you know, the studio stuff is that they think that means that you want to hit everybody in the same way--you want a four-quadrant movie--old people like it, young people like it, men, women. You want to homogenize the experience.

But, in fact, if it's really working, if it's really art, it is touching everybody and it's doing it differently for every person. Because what they are doing is that they are incorporating their story into it."

Western Union: Wired in

"We're a remittance company. The ability to accommodate and expand and extend into new technologies is really core to our strategy."
Matt Dill, GM of Western Union's Mobile Division on NPR yesterday.

Last year, Western Union sent $64 billion to over 200 countries primarily on behalf of immigrants who are sending money to support families back home. It's extremely focused on those customers and that business (now that it has sent its last telegram) and, based on Matt's comments, its management team knows exactly who they are and what they do.

Such companies have an important competitive advantage over those that don't have such a clear idea of what business they are in or what their strategic objectives are. They are, for example, much better prepared to make business decisions quickly even when those decisions are potentially disruptive to their business model.

Specific case in point: Western Union is now going to let its customers move money by mobile phone from one handset to another bypassing the normal visit to an Agent. Rather than fight technology, Western Union has decided to embrace it. As opposed, perhaps, to the music industry?

Source: NPR

"Perfect in being much too short"

That's a quote from Emma, by Jane Austen about a picnic. Not sure why it keeps rattling around in my brain - I read the book many years ago for an English Literature class and I don't remember liking it all that much.

And the whole idea of the attractiveness of under delivering seems very foreign and old fashioned. These days there's always room for ten more pages to a presentation or one more thing to cram into a day.

What were they thinking to have us read such stuff?

The tax on being the same

A quote that I just found on John Winsor's Cultural Radar blog:

"I believe advertising is the tax you pay for being unremarkable."
- Robert Stephens, CEO, Geek Squad at the Idea Conference

I think that's true. The more distinctive you are, the less you have to shout out from the crowd. Of course, the crowd always gathers where the action is (where it's relevant to be) so just standing out on your own is no guarantee of success. But if you can find that place where you are both remarkable and offering something that people want, then that's a very good place to be.

(This idea of finding uncontested open space is an idea expressed very well by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne in their book Blue Ocean Strategy .)

"Action speaks louder than words but not nearly as often." Mark Twain

I hadn't seen that quote before. It's a good one to keep in mind while developing brand positioning. If a new positioning doesn't translate into action it will be just words.

The importance of context

Great quote from David Katz writing in Esquire:

"A guy in black eyeliner at a Marilyn Manson concert? That's easy. A guy in black eyeliner at a rodeo? Now that takes balls."

"You can't build a reputation on what you're going to do"

So said Henry Ford.

Worse still is trying to build a reputation on something you're actually failing to do. (My favorite example: the ill-fated Rising campaign by United Airlines which coincided with a period of falling levels of service and customer satisfaction.)

The marketing challenge is to make sure the sequence of what you say and what you do is lined up with actions coming before words, sometimes well before if you have a lot of credibility catching up to do.