Creating the Organization of the Future: Building on Drucker and Confucius Foundations

“Every organization needs a commitment to values and constant reaffirmation, just as the human body needs vitamins and minerals.” -Peter Drucker

“The Way is made by walking in it.” -Confucius

Creating the Organization of the Future is a great read for leaders looking to enhance their impact as change agents. Drucker is credited as the father of modern management. The book provides a powerful window into Drucker’s teachings, connecting them to Confucianism in actionable ways. It provides a primer on how to develop better mission, vision, and purpose (MVP) statements, as well as guidance on how to ensure that your organizational values and culture reinforce and bring your MVP to life.

The book was co-authored by professors Bernie Jaworski and Virginia Cheung. Professor Jaworski is the Peter F. Drucker Chair in Management and the Liberal Arts at Claremont Graduate University. Virginia Cheung is associate Professor at Shenzhen University and holds a PhD from Claremont Graduate University.

Why the Teachings of Drucker and Confucius Go Well Together

I found this book personally meaningful given my own interests in Drucker’s work. My father spent time with Drucker for some of the work he led at Arthur Andersen, and we had many conversations about Drucker’s ideas. I led off my own book, The CX & Culture Connection with a quote from Drucker, reinforcing the importance of culture and why leaders should focus on CX and culture together to have greater impact at their organizations.

Though Drucker (1909-2005) and Confucius (551-479 BCE) lived more than two millennium apart, their ideas share much in common. Drucker championed a set of leadership principles for how to build a learning organization that is “the place to convert knowledge workers’ specialized knowledge into performance.” Confucius focused on how leaders can leverage their knowledge to contribute to a more harmonious society. The authors lay out a set of principles from Drucker’s and Confucius’ thinking that are practical guides for leaders to define and realize their mission, vision, and purpose.

Confucius emphasized five virtues that leaders can practice over lifelong learning. They are benevolence (ren), righteousness (yi), ritual (li), wisdom (zhi) and trust (xin). These virtues align well with Drucker’s emphasis on continuous learning and tapping into the intrinsic motivation of all employees to support the organization’s mission, vision, and purpose. Confucius focused on pride in oneself to have honor and avoid shame as the best motivator, not punishment. Drucker also believed that the mind should be guided by virtuous thinking and focused on achieving objectives one has committed to that align to the organization’s strategic focus.

Drucker and Confucius were both human-centered, caring about peoples’ values, growth, and personal development. Both favored a multi-disciplinary approach weaving together philosophy, psychology, history, and religion. Drucker wrote about “making knowledge productive.” Confucius focused on the “philosophy of practical life.” They both placed a heavy emphasis on shared goals, and empowering workers. Drucker spoke about “pushing accountability down” and giving front-line workers a sense of ownership to deliver customer value. Confucius emphasized “establishing others as to establish yourself,” empowering them on a journey of self-realization and pride in their contributions. While they didn’t use the same terms, they both aimed to create a better functioning society with more social harmony.

Drucker is often misquoted for saying “culture eats strategy for breakfast.” What he really said is “culture – no matter how defined – is singularly persistent.” What Drucker meant is that culture is hard to change without sustained focus, and that paying attention to culture is critical to building the motivation and commitment to change for your organization’s strategy. Confucius also recognized the importance of nurturing habits and reinforcing them via rituals to drive effective change.

Developing Your Organization’s Mission, Vision, and Purpose (MVP)

An organization’s mission, vision, and purpose statements serve different roles in guiding decision making and motivating employees. A good mission statement helps clarify the theory of the business and how it aims to create value beyond the functional benefits of its products and services. If too narrowly worded on where it is focused today, the organization may fail to adapt. The vision lays out the goal for the organization, defining what the world will look like when it achieves its mission. Without a clear mission and vision, the leadership team has no context to make strategic choices around what markets to serve, competitive positioning, and what capabilities to invest in to drive growth. The organization’s purpose addresses “why do we exist?” It sparks employees’ energy to support the mission and vision, answering why society benefits from the organization’s growth.

A clear MVP is not a substitute for a good strategy and organizational effectiveness to drive better decision making and execution. But without a clear MVP, it is harder to build alignment across the organization and focus energy on the right things.

The book provides a set of core questions that you can focus on in developing good MVP statements. It also provides excellent examples to bring these concepts to life. The authors also lay out why it is important to pay attention to the way you engage your organization in developing your MVP. Building a strong MVP is more of a top-down, leader-led exercise, though it can be valuable to engage the broader organization to reinforce motivation and commitment to change.

Focusing on Values and Culture to Bring Your MVP to Life

While mission, vision, and purpose are more externally focused, and can be developed via a more top-down exercise, values and culture are more internally focused and benefit from broader engagement within the organization. Your culture needs to align with the unique choices you make for your MVP, and you need to activate behavior broadly across the organization to build the strategic capabilities that bring your MVP to life. Moreover, if you don’t pay careful attention to culture as part of your change management efforts, you won’t achieve the results you are looking for and will waste a lot of organizational energy. Engaging the organization more broadly is necessary for values and culture, because your focus is influencing daily habits across all employees.

The authors define an organization’s values as the “core principles that drive standards of behavior in organizations.” Your values are ideals, whereas your cultural behaviors are what people really do. Culture is the “pattern of shared assumptions about what makes the organization survive and thrive. It is learned over time and is considered valid and important enough to be taught to new members to perceive, think, and feel about what it takes to be successful.” Any organization will have a mix of good and bad behaviors, where the good behaviors help live up to the ideals and bad ones erode them. Having a published set of values is not actionable if you don’t take the time and effort to reinforce them as habits across all employees in the organization.

Drucker saw it as everyone’s responsibility to nurture the culture, given how important culture is in shaping the way a company reinforces and rewards performance, how it allocates resources, and how it motivates its people. Confucius advocated regular practice of communal rituals to reinforce habits.

In Creating the Organization of the Future, the authors include a set of diagnostic questions to help assess whether your organization is adopting the core principles embodied in Drucker’s and Confucius’ teachings. The example survey items are useful as a high-level way of assessing your organization’s alignment with the core principles in the book. The authors also provide guidance on how to engage stakeholders over a series of workshops to go from a long list of habits to a more focused set for which to drive behavior adoption.

My only critique of the approach laid out in the book is that it risks remaining at too high a level when shaping the right list of behaviors for habit building. In my experience, it helps to add more clarity on the specific choices for how your customer experience delivers on your brand promise. Linking behaviors to your MVP is a good start but may not provide enough strategic clarity to make the behaviors most actionable.

At JourneySpark, we’ve developed a set of diagnostic tools called the CX & Culture Connection® Value Accelerator, which includes three complementary modules. The Strategy Module helps build alignment among your leaders for where to focus across Better, Faster, and Cheaper for capability building and experience design investments. The Cultural Alignment module helps assess how well aligned your current culture is to your strategic priorities. The Voice of the Customer (VOC) module, helps assess whether your CX is congruent with your brand promise, and what emotions to focus on evoking along the customer journey to bring your brand promise to life in meaningful and memorable ways. Taken together, this suite of tools helps to focus your efforts on prioritizing the right set of behaviors for which to scale habit building at your organization.

I highly recommend reading Creating the Organization of the Future, whether you are a C-suite leader or earlier in your career and looking to increase your impact as a change agent at your organization. The book provides actionable approaches to develop and continuously refine your MVP, and bring them to life through focus on habit building for the right cultural behaviors that reinforce your MVP. I found the authors’ analysis of the similarities between Drucker’s and Confucius’ systems of thought very insightful.

I hope this sparks some great ideas and energy for you to take action!