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How To Be An Employee The Peter Drucker Way

Timeless wisdom from the father of modern management's commencement address from 1964.

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Bruce Rosenstein
Bruce Rosenstein
06/03/2018

It occurred to me recently that college and/or high school courses on ‘How to Be an Employee’ could deliver great benefits to society. Perhaps one reason that so many workplaces are dysfunctional and worse is that people learn how to be employees from (often negative) experience, and from observing people who are unworthy role models.

Such courses would not be easy to teach or take, but we could draw inspiration from Drucker’s article. Unfortunately, it is hard to find. It was anthologized in 1977 in the Harper’s College Press book People and Performance: The Best of Peter Drucker on Management, but when the book was reissued by Harvard Business School Pressin 2007, the essay was not included.

Here are selected quotes from that article, all of which remain as relevant today as they were in 1952...