I was also surprised that I saw Lean and Lean Startup principles within the Drucker framework. Not that he wasn’t about continuous improvement, but how does those thoughts parallel with Drucker? – Joe Dager
The Podcast and Transcription is available at: The Drucker Institute
Peter Gandolfo: I think the concepts are very complementary. To give you an example, Drucker promoted a concept he called ‘Planned Abandonment’ which is a systematic process for assessing existing products, services, programs and those could be internal or external, that could be abandoned so that a team can shift human and financial resources to opportunities that will generate better results. I think this works very well with Lean because it presents opportunities to right size resources based on the returns that they generate and that sometimes means eliminating that program or some of the resources completely and sometimes it just means to reduce them to be in commencement with the results that you expect. We recently delivered a UN Workshop to a group of Lean healthcare executives from around the country and what stood out to them was that the process challenged them to think about where those resources would go when they stopped doing something. They were accustomed to the idea of cutting things out but they never really thought about where they would reallocate those resources.
As far as the Lean Startup principle, I think it’s aligned with Drucker’s work in that both put the customer and what the customer values at the center. The 5 Y’s would frame up an analysis with questions and while the questions that we ask may be different, we do follow a similar approach in asking the right questions, instead of claiming to know the answers. I’d say that Drucker believed that innovation is defined as anything that creates a new dimension of performance, and this would include the Lean Startup method of validated learning which promotes adapting a product as insights come forward, and it’s not always just this Big-bang theory of innovation.
About: The Business Development Director of the Drucker Institute, Peter Gondolfo, joined me on the podcast to discuss Peter Drucker and the future of the institute. I think you will be quite surprised at how the Peter Drucker’s Legacy is evolving.
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