Drucker

Peter Drucker has been jipped, reputation-wise. He’s exalted in management circles, but most other thinking people don’t pay him much mind. (Because, as the thinking goes, anything from that part of the bookstore reeks of imaginative failure.) Drucker wrote for decades; his “The Concept of the Corporation” was first published in 1946, and he kept on writing into his nineties until his death in 2005 finally put an end to it. Reading his work, which is most fundamentally an examination of human behavior under the influence of the group, and particularly about the mores of people that came to be known as “knowledge workers,” can be bracing. He had an ability to slice through a lot of the political and motivational inanities that dot, nay, blanket the American landscape.

Tip #2: Read “The Concept of the Corporation.” In the revised 1960 edition, for instance, he dissected the cultural emphasis on “getting ahead.” Getting ahead had come to be seen as the exclusive criterion for success — a historical anomaly, he pointed out — and so we turned a blind eye to the bedrock, scientific fact that “inevitably only a minority can advance.” When people started fretting about shrinking opportunities for advancement, he felt they were being a bit (albeit unconsciously) disingenuous. What they were dealing with was an economy that now offered fewer and fewer “opportunities for self-fulfillment except in advancement.” [emphasis mine]

What does Drucker suggest people who aren’t interested in getting ahead do with themselves? Garden? Join a monastary? Seems to me he posits that one do anything other than sign on to work in a white-collar corporate setting. Drop out or don’t drop out, just don’t kid yourself. Because if you’re not willing to endure the pecking order, the collective neuroses, and not ambitious (or angry) enough to lie awake at night imagining innovative ways to rise up through them, you will…suffer. In every conceivable way. I like how a lot of the smarter business books are actually dis-inspirational in this way. (I hadn’t expected that to be the case.)

Then there’s this nugget, from his unfortunately titled “Managing Oneself,” which appeared in the Harvard Business Review in 1999:

“Most people think they know what they are good at. They are usually wrong.”

In defense of “Useful”

Over the past two years, when I’ve described this book to people, I’ve encountered occasional static when I reveal the title. “How to Be Useful?” they’ll ask, unsure they’ve heard correctly, not convinced anyone would aspire to such a state. There’s a novel called How to Be Good (Nick Hornby), a collection of essays titled How to Be Alone (Jonathan Franzen, who I imagine knows a lot about that subject), but “useful” sounds like a totally unnecessary addition to the how-to canon. Plus, my book’s about other books that tell you how to be successful—“successful” everybody gets, and can more or less appreciate. Successful sparkles. Useful seems a more apt description of cordless appliances.

I chose useful because I wanted to suggest that most early efforts toward gaining professional traction are fundamentally misguided. With few exceptions, you’ll work your way up in an organization not by dazzling people with your skills, but by fulfilling very specific needs for specific individuals in highly defined ways. Because you meet these needs, it’s more useful to have you around than it is to not have you around. Period. First step of ladder—that’s all it is.

This, of course, is entirely amoral. (That is to say, it’s neither virtue nor vice. Both Montessori kindergarten teachers and the Waffen-SS fit the above criteria for their respective organizations.) But then I’d say that by advocating for usefulness, that on some exceedingly flimsy philosophical level I’m suggesting that most of us, most days, just need to get over ourselves. And divert some of our angst and excess energy toward helping—not hurting—any poor suckers so unfortunate as to bump into us. I love a good misanthropic, self-absorbed crank as much as the next girl, but these days it seems too many people adopt that pose without the life experience or the scars to really deserve it. Anybody who hasn’t lost a limb to a landmine, so to speak, needs to step up.

So yes, useful. As opposed to useless.