Business Insight Zone

The late Peter Drucker teaching a class

That was one of the penetrating questions Peter Drucker used to ask of managers at the companies he visited. It’s a classic “naive question” — simple on the outside, but easy to get wrong if you let yourself be led astray by the hurly-burly of business.

The question comes to mind because of this great comment Brenda Michelson made on last week’s post, “Let dead people solve your problems for you”:

. . . i was working with a company trying to move from retail silos — store, catalog, web — to true customer centric multi-channel retail. everyone was getting caught up in the enormity of each channel and the cross-interactions and then it occurred to me that as an organization “we sell things to people”. while there was variation in the sequence of actions and physicality, there was a simple common denominator. by recognizing the concepts of a common base and variations, we were better able to get our minds around the problem space and solution.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it? “We sell things to people.” Yet the smart folks in Brenda’s organization needed that kind of simple lodestone to guide their work on that huge project.

My bias is like Drucker’s — and like Albert Einstein’s. Einstein, you may recall, said

“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”

If the ghost of Peter Drucker put you on the spot, could you give a simple answer to the question, “What business are you in?”

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Related posts:

• How will we know when we win?
• The power of naive questions.

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(Picture via Claremont Graduate University.)