Information Outlook, Vol. 6, No. 6, June 2002
The Nonprofits
by Bruce Rosenstein
Although Peter Drucker is best known as a management guru, his effect reaches far beyond the world of business.
For years he has written about the opportunities and challenges afforded in the social sector, the world of nonprofit organizations. It is no accident that the organization dedicated to his work is The Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management.
Through his foundation and writings, Drucker has made available to the knowledge worker a body of work that teaches about charities, hospitals, churches, etc., (both their management and leadership) and opportunities for growth and advancement for the individual. He estimates there are 1.3 million of these nonprofit organizations in the country.
As he has pointed out in many articles and books, the career of a successful business person or knowledge worker often takes a turn toward the nonprofits, either as a parallel career, or eventually as a move completely away from business and into the social sector.
He has also written about what business can learn from nonprofits, in such areas as defining mission and results, and in providing meaningful work for its staff, volunteers and executives. Drucker points out that it is often easier to see the results of your work when you work or volunteer for a nonprofit organization.
This is tailor-made for the knowledge worker members of SLA. Many of us already work in nonprofits and are seeking to be more effective. Others may volunteer in these organizations or may be contemplating a future career in one. And of course many of the businesses we work for operate their own foundations or are involved with nonprofits in partnerships and in contributing money and volunteers to a variety of nonprofit institutions.
There are several sources for learning about Drucker and nonprofits. Possibly the most important is his foundation's Web site (www.drucker.org). It is packed with information about the operation of all types of nonprofit organizations, including a popular feature called the "Self-Assessment Tool" (http://www.drucker.org/leaderbooks/sat/questions.html), an exercise for organizational development built around five Drucker questions: What is our mission? Who is our customer? What does the customer value? What are our results? What is our plan?
The site also includes articles from the foundation's award-winning quarterly journal, Leader to Leader.
Some of these articles are also collected in an excellent series of books the Drucker Foundation publishes with Jossey-Bass, such as Leading Beyond the Walls and The Community of the Future.
Each of these books features a blue-chip lineup of contributors. Leading Beyond the Walls has the likes of Jim Collins, Peter Senge and Arun Gandhi, grandson of Mohandas Gandhi. The Community of the Future includes Drucker, Stephen R. Covey, Lester Thurow and an afterword by Elie Wiesel. The book also includes a chapter, "How Boomers, Churches and Entrepreneurs Can Transform Society," by Bob Buford, a Texas broadcasting businessman turned social/religious entrepreneur. Buford has long been associated with Drucker. He is one of the people Drucker interviewed in his 1990 book Managing the Nonprofit Organization: Practices and Principles and he helped found the Drucker Foundation that same year. Drucker has also written the foreword for two of Buford's spiritually oriented, self-help books.
The world of the spirit is powerful in Drucker's writings and work. He has written considerably about the so-called "mega-churches" with thousands of members, such as Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois. He says the ability of these churches to determine and deliver what people want, while involving their members intimately in the operation of the church, makes them a model for other organizations, nonprofit or not.
This is the final column on Peter Drucker, as we approach his keynote address in June at the 2002 Special Libraries Association Annual Conference in Los Angeles. I hope that Drucker's ideas, both what you will hear in his keynote and what you have read in these eight columns, will aid you on your own journey, as Drucker says, from "success to significance."
Selected bibliography:
The Community of the Future: Drucker Foundation Future Series, edited by Frances Hesselbein, Marshall Goldsmith, Richard Beckhard and Richard F. Schubert (Jossey-Bass, 1998).
The Essential Drucker (HarperCollins, 2001).
Leading Beyond the Walls: Drucker Foundation Wisdom to Action Series, edited by Frances Hesselbein, Marshall Goldsmith and Iain Somerville (Jossey-Bass, 1999).
Managing the Nonprofit Organization: Practices and Principles (HarperBusiness,1990).
Bruce Rosenstein is a librarian at USA TODAY and an adjunct professor at The Catholic University School of Library and Information Science in Washington, D.C. He can be reached at brosenstein@usatoday.com.
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