The Drucker Exchange

If you’ve advanced in your professional status and dread that upcoming trip to Cincinnati, you’re not alone.

According to a new report, summarized in a fun infographic at the HBR Blog, senior executives who spend a lot of time on planes and in hotel rooms tend to find travel a lot more burdensome than do support staff.

The authors, from the company Carlson Wagonlit Travel and the business school HEC Paris, surveyed more than 7,000 corporate travelers and examined travel from the perspective of six different ranks—from support staff to the C-suite—with an eye on 33 different stressors, including immigration and customs, flight seating, fear of flying, hotel quality and expense reports.

Many of the results were intriguing. For example, “the most senior executives are much less stressed by flying in economy-class seats”; it is lower-ranking managers who are bothered. The authors suggest this is because GMs and CEOs often set travel policies and “therefore wear their economy-class membership as an emblem of shareholder value.” Another finding: Women are much more stressed than men by travel across nearly all measurements. A third insight: Post-trip expense reports cause a lot of stress for vice presidents, very little for CEOs.

Peter Drucker would have appreciated the high degree of stress being generated overall by business travel. Although he jetted around the world a lot, he was nevertheless a skeptic of frequent travel, noting that executives did just fine before airplanes became an ordinary, everyday part of life starting in the 1950s. Then suddenly, “the advantage of direct access, face to face, to associates, partners and customers in faraway places so greatly outweighed the fatigue and cost of air travel as to encourage gross overindulgence in it,” Drucker wrote in The Changing World of the Executive.

All the while, new forms of communication were actually making physical presence less important. “Executives will therefore have to think more carefully about what to use travel for,” Drucker advised.

In The Effective Executive, he took even sharper aim at business trips, pointing out that travel easily squanders time, a top manager’s most precious resource. “The jet plane is indeed overrated as a management tool,” Drucker wrote. “A great many trips have to be made; but a junior can make most of them. Travel is still a novelty for him. He is still young enough to get a good night’s rest in hotel beds.” For that reason, travel was a leading candidate for pruning, an example of the work of executives “that can easily be done by others, and therefore should be done by others.”

How on earth does Pixar do it?

The computer-animation production company has turned out 14 box-office blockbusters in a row. Rave reviews. Great screenplays.

Now, Ed Catmull, one of the company’s founders, has written a book, Creativity Inc., which promises to clear up a bit of the mystery. In an excerpt prepared for Fast Company, Catmull explains that one of the company’s “key mechanisms” is the “Braintrust,” which meets every few months or so and operates on the following principle: “Put smart, passionate people in a room together, charge them with identifying and solving problems and encourage them to be candid.”

Catmull says that there are two important characteristics of the Braintrust. The first is that it offers much-needed perspective. “People who take on complicated creative projects become lost at some point in the process,” he writes. “Where once a movie’s writer/director had perspective, he or she loses it. Where once he or she could see a forest, now there are only trees. How do you get a director to address a problem he or she cannot see?”

The second is that the Braintrust concerns itself with the task, not the person. “The film—not the filmmaker—is under the microscope,” he says. “This principle eludes most people, but it is critical: You are not your idea, and if you identify too closely with your ideas, you will take offense when challenged.”

Peter Drucker would have surely been taken with Catmull’s insights, and in fact we’ve covered a number of these points before, including the importance of candor, trust and perspective.

But one area worthy of elaboration is the need to make sure the work at hand doesn’t get too personal.

Drucker recognized that many people identify closely with their jobs—and so it’s not surprising that they can take it hard when their ideas are questioned or criticized. A person’s “relationship to his work underlies all of man’s life and achievements,” he wrote in The Practice of Management.

And yet, like Catmull, Drucker thought it crucial for people not to view challenges to their ideas as a personal affront. “Emotions always run high” over key decisions, Drucker noted. “The smart thing is to treat this as constructive dissent and as a key to mutual understanding.”

At the same time, those doing the questioning need to be careful not to make it personal. They must focus on “What is right?” rather than “Who is right?” “To put personality above the requirements of the work is corruption and corrupts,” Drucker asserted. “To ask ‘Who is right?’ encourages one’s subordinates to play safe.”

Would you like the Mona Lisa if others didn’t? Would you still think Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony was good? Would you still think the songs of the Beatles were superior to those of, say, Justin Bieber?

In a report last week on NPR’s Morning Edition, Alix Spiegel raised the question of whether our collective aesthetic judgments are due more to chance than we think. She reported that a Princeton professor named Matthew Salganik has run an experiment addressing precisely this issue.

The test went as follows: Some 30,000 teenagers recruited online were separated into nine groups and exposed to a collection of 48 songs from emerging recording artists. They could download the ones they liked best for free. The findings? If they could see a history of what their peers in their group had already picked, the teens often joined the crowd, giving certain songs momentum. But the songs that emerged as leaders differed from group to group. A song that came in first in one group came in 40th in another.

“There were differences in the beginnings, and then the process of social influence and cumulative advantage sort of magnified those small, random initial differences,” Salganik told Spiegel.

The takeaway, in Salganik’s view, goes beyond music: “I think that if you believe that there’s a large role for chance in the outcomes that people have and the kinds of success that people have and also the kinds of failures that people have, it changes how you treat other people,” he said.

In other words, we ought to be a bit humbler about our success and recognize the role of luck.

As far as Peter Drucker was concerned, he maintained that some works of art have inherent qualities that elevate them into the realm of the sublime—regardless of audience differences. For instance, in the case of Dante’s Divina Commedia, it is the “multiplicity of levels on which this book can be read, from being a fairy tale to being a grand synthesis of metaphysics, that makes it the overpowering work of art that it is,” Drucker wrote in a 1969 essay on communication.

But not even the greatest art can be counted on to promote itself, and even Dante required sales and distribution. As Drucker wrote in Post-Capitalist Society, “Even the most solitary artists, writers or painters depend on others for their work to become effective—the writer on an editor, a printer, a bookshop; the painter on a gallery.”

And while luck has a big role in our lives, and many things are a matter of chance, long-term success tends not to be. “‘Opportunity is where you find it,’ says an old proverb. It does not say: ‘ . . . where it finds you,’” Drucker noted in Managing for Results. “Luck, chance and catastrophe affect business as they do all human endeavors. But luck never built a business. Prosperity and growth come only to the business that systematically finds and exploits its potential.”

Alas, McDonald’s has been out-bunned.

The hamburger giant and rival Wendy’s have taken different approaches to their businesses in recent years, and Wendy’s has prospered while McDonald’s, lately, has stumbled. Why?

Evidently, things have gotten too complicated on the McDonald’s menu. “We need to do fewer products with better execution,” said the company’s chief operating officer, Tim Fenton.

Tom Gara of The Wall Street Journal concurs, finding McDonald’s guilty of “firing multiple shots in all directions” and overwhelming customers and franchisees with “chicken wings, fish nuggets, bacon habanero ranch burgers and a line of wraps, among many other things.” By contrast, Wendy’s “doubled down on its core burger lineup and introduced a very successful twist: the pretzel bun.”

So, Gara asked, “Is it better to be a cunning player of many games, or a highly focused one-trick pony?”

Actually, it depends. (Sorry, it just does.) As we’ve pointed out, Peter Drucker stressed the importance of focus, of avoiding product clutter and of keeping innovation simple. Still, while McDonald’s miscalculated, that doesn’t mean that it was being foolhardy.

Adding food items to a restaurant menu isn’t terribly drastic, after all. And, as Drucker noted in Managing for Results, “The odds against any new product’s becoming even a moderate success are roughly five to one, and the odds against it becoming a smash hit are 100 to one.” So, failing the miracle pretzel bun, you’ve got to try a few things.

What’s more, McDonald’s is in many respects what Drucker called a “creative imitator,” an entrepreneur that “does not invent a product or service” but rather “perfects and positions it” through effective marketing and management. With creative imitators, Drucker explained, the requirements are for “alertness, for flexibility, and . . . for hard work and massive efforts”—all of which McDonald’s has put forth.

However, creative imitators also have vulnerabilities. “Creative imitators are easily tempted to splinter their efforts in the attempt to hedge their bets,” Drucker warned. “Another danger is to misread the trend and imitate creatively what then turns out not to be the winning development in the marketplace.”

That apparently includes the bacon habanero ranch burger.