Peter Drucker claimed a boatload of honors over the course of his career: the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Order of the Sacred Treasure from the Emperor of Japan, and a huge assortment of other bronze busts, crystal statuettes, and filigreed scrolls. So it seems fitting to end the year by handing out 10 Drucker-inspired awards.
Every winner taught us something about running an organization in 2011 (whether he intended to or not). An actual Drucker quote (drawn from his books, articles, and interviews) follows each bestowal—something that perhaps the late management teacher and writer would have said before handing over the hardware. And now the envelopes, please.
The Looking Toward the Long Term Laurel
To Jeff Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon.com, for his steadfast willingness to peer past quarterly results and make the investments his company will need to succeed far down the line—or, as he has put it, “to plant seeds” and “let them grow.”
“To be sure, every company has to produce short-term results. But in any conflict between short-term results and long-term growth, each company will determine its own priority. This is not primarily a disagreement about economics. It is fundamentally a value conflict regarding the function of a business and the responsibility of management.”
The Sincerest Form of Flattery Seal
To Google CEO Larry Page, for getting off to a hot start with the company’s Google+ social networking service, which seems to have unabashedly borrowed from—and yet sought to improve upon—what rival Facebook offers.
“The creative imitator exploits the success of others. … The creative imitator does not invent a product or service; he perfects and positions it.”
The Truly Treasuring Time Trophy
To Atos CEO Thierry Breton, for his plan to eliminate all e-mail between company employees after deciding that his people were “spending too much time” responding to unproductive messages in their inboxes and “not enough time on management.”
“It is amazing how many things busy people are doing that never will be missed.”
The Service With the Mostest Citation
To the country’s credit unions, for providing an all-time-high level of value to their patrons, according to the latest American Customer Satisfaction Index. By comparison, giant financial institutions such as Bank of America, which have infuriated customers by trying to impose new fees, scored very low.
“A company is not necessarily better because it is bigger any more than the elephant is better because it is bigger than the honeybee.”
The Capitalism Has Gone Off Course Cup
To anthropologist David Graeber and others behind the Occupy Wall Street movement, for sparking an essential national conversation about how things are going—and why—for the 1 percent compared with the 99 percent.
About 175 years ago, “an epidemic in London’s poor East End made the wealthy in the West End realize for the first time that typhoid among the poor threatened them, too.”
The Customer Will Love It! Commendation
To Reed Hastings, the chief executive of Netflix, whose company declared in July that a fee increase and new movie-delivery plan was a “terrific value” for customers, only to see those customers stage a major revolt from which the business is still struggling to recover.
“To start out with the customer’s utility, with what the customer buys, with what the realities of the customer are and what the customer’s values are—this is what marketing is all about. But why after 40 years of preaching marketing, teaching marketing, professing marketing, so few suppliers are willing to follow, I cannot explain.”
The Profits Go Poof Prize
To Groupon CEO Andrew Mason for announcing, “We don’t measure ourselves in conventional ways,” as his company indicated that it had earned more than $80 million in the first quarter. Of course, Groupon had used a funky financial metric that it called “adjusted consolidated segment operating income” (which basically amounted to “profits” before subtracting expenses). Groupon was later forced to use more conventional accounting methods, which showed that the company had actually racked up a loss of nearly $100 million.
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