Saturday, March 19, 2005

As part of a series to celebrate its 75th anniversary, Fortune magazine, in its latest issue, presents "The Best Advice I Ever Got" - 27 or so luminaries talk about the people who most influenced their business lives.

Here's what Peter Drucker had to say - he's 95!!!!!!!

Get good - or get out.

"The most important instruction I received was when I was just 20 and three weeks into my first real job as a foreign affairs and business editor of the large-circulation afternoon paper in Frankfurt. I brought my first two editorials to the editor-in-chief, a German. He took one look at them and threw them back at me saying, 'They are no good at all.' After I'd been on the job for three weeks, he called me in and said, 'Drucker, if you don't improve radically in the next three weeks, you'd better look for another job.'

For me, that was the right treatment. He did not try to mentor me. The idea would have been considered absurd. The idea of mentoring was post-World War II. In those days (before World War II), you were hired to do your job, and if you didn't do it, you were out. It was very simple."

Hmmmm. All this mentoring and nurturing that we do these days for kids who think it's their birth right to be molly-coddled ... wonder if it isn't time to go back to the basics and remind people that they get paid to do their jobs and the very least they can do is get it right.

Posted by BeanZ | Permalink: 11:41 PM |