Peter Drucker, Rhetoric, and Language

Consultant Peter Drucker played at the boundary of the humanities and the marketplace, providing us with an example of how the liberal arts could enrich the practice of management.

Like Marshall McLuhan, Peter Drucker was one of those intellectuals who played at the boundary of the humanities and the marketplace. He had a way of making business problems interesting for those who like to read books and engage in philosophical speculation.

I like to think he also made the liberal arts meaningful for those practical-minded types working at corporations.

Drucker served as a consultant for who knows how many different companies, including Coca-Cola. But he also lectured on the Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard. How many management consultants do you know who have an interest in both giving practical advice to a gigantic corporation and also lecturing on an obscure 19th century proto-existentialist?

He would give his students engaging exercises like this extraordinary thought experiment, wherein you’re invited to play the role of a friend to a frustrated Vice President. The prompt is thoroughly rhetorical in nature; it asks you to write out “POSSIBLE ALTERNATIVES of ACTION and BEHAVIOR” as well as a list of pros and cons for each line of action for your friend.

In his Rhetoric, Aristotle explains how the art involves discerning the lines of argument open to you as a rhetor. Rhetoric helps you sort out possible avenues for speech and action. The manager has precisely the same task.

Certain individuals may think of management as a meaningless or oppressive institution. Consider Alasdair MacIntyre’s takedown of the manager as a character type of modernity is After Virtue. The manager, as per MacIntyre, feigns the ability to predict and control social reality (see Ch. 8 of After Virtue).

In his article The Management Myth, Matthew Stewart explains how much management theory pretends to “esoteric certitude” and that it is “mostly a subgenre of self-help.” In general, both MacIntyre and Stewart take issue with the reductive and especially the mystifying character of management.

Herein lies the genius of Peter Drucker, who teaches us many valuable things about how to best practice management in a rhetorical manner. Drucker draws our attention to the rhetorical dimensions of management, especially in his work The Practice of Management. Rather than peddle in mystifications, the manager must motivate. Drucker writes,

“He [the manager] does not ‘handle’ people; he motivates, guides, organizes people to do their own work. His tool—his only tool—to do all this is the spoken or written word or the language of numbers. No matter whether the manager’s job is engineering, accounting or selling, his effectiveness depends on his ability to listen and to read, on his ability to speak and to write. He needs skill in getting his thinking across to other people as well as skill in finding out what other people are after.”  

Communication lies at the heart of a manager’s day-to-day activities. Furthermore, we might add that the manager of today must understand media. When will a meme suffice over a bar graph? When should a narrative replace a PowerPoint?

Drucker continues:

“Managers have to learn to know language, to understand what words are and what they mean. Perhaps most important, they have to acquire respect for language as man’s most precious gift and heritage. The manager must understand the meaning of the old definition of rhetoric as ‘the art which draw’s men’s heart to the love of true knowledge.’ Without ability to motivate by means of the written and spoken word or the telling number, a manager cannot be successful.”

So what ought a manager (or aspiring manager) to study nowadays? Rhetoric, of course. And media. And perhaps even communication, broadly speaking.

Thanks for reading. If you think others might find this interesting or thought-provoking, why not share it with them? And also, why not leave a comment or a question or a provocation below? The Claremont Colleges Digital Library collection of the Drucker Archives is worth looking at if you’re interested in Drucker’s approach to management. Reference to Drucker appears in Richard Lanham’s Economics of Attention. Lastly, the image of Drucker found above is located here.