Peter Drucker’s favorite way to make management’s abstractions tangible was to analogize society and its organizations to the human body. In a pandemic, this laces his writing with a bitter irony.

“A healthy business, a healthy university, a healthy hospital cannot exist in a sick society,” Drucker wrote in 1974. “Management has a self-interest in a healthy society, even though the cause of society’s sickness is none of management’s making.”

Society is literally sick from the novel coronavirus that has infected millions and killed hundreds of thousands around the world. But it is also metaphorically sick insofar as management has let atrophy the very strengths we need to effectively navigate this crisis.

One of the great challenges now before us is to see below the daily turbulence into the deep currents that have brought us here. “Defining the problem may be the most important element in making effective decisions,” Drucker wrote, “and the one managers pay the least attention to. They try to cure the symptom rather than the disease.”

The problem as the Drucker Institute sees it is not that business is inordinately focused on short-term financial gains, that too many nonprofits are ineffective or that government is both too big and too small. These are all symptoms.

The disease is an abdication of responsibility. “If the managers of our major institutions . . . do not take responsibility for the common good,” Drucker reminded us, “no one else can or will.”

This publication shows how the Drucker Institute is contributing to a cure.

What is heartening at such a difficult time is that large numbers of managers and organizations from all sectors are reclaiming responsibility for the common good and countering the negative trends with positive ones: Stakeholder capitalism. Lifelong learning. Reinventing government. Social innovation.

Peter Drucker, whose writing and thinking can be found at the root of each of these movements, would have identified them as advancements “already trying to happen on their own.” Our strategy at the Drucker Institute is to lean into the things trying to happen, to leverage the momentum of these movements, to use their burgeoning reach and power to amplify and extend our own work.

That doesn’t mean our aims are easily achievable. In many cases, powerful forces are lined up to resist change and, even where they’re not, inertia alone can make the status quo seem unshakable.

But shakeable it is, and the Drucker Institute has had a greater impact than any of us would have dared hope when it was founded 13 years ago. Day by day, working hard, we’re chipping away at what ails society. In the pages that follow, we hope to give a sense of how we’re part of the remedy.

A decade ago, lifelong learning was an ideal. Today, it is an imperative.

The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that up to 800 million global workers could find themselves replaced by automation in the next 10 years, and almost nine out of 10 managers surveyed say they face current or imminent skill gaps within their organizations.

“More than a century has passed since the universal high-school movement took off in the United States and 50 years since the college-for-all movement began,” Arizona State University’s Jeffrey Selingo has written. “Now it’s clear a third wave in the evolution of education is needed to compete in a new economy in which learning can never end.”

The Drucker Institute has added to this latest wave through several programs, including our Harbor Freight Leadership Lab, which aims to improve the effectiveness of skilled trades education leaders in public schools across America.

But the heart of our contribution to lifelong learning has been Bendable, a community-based system that allows residents of all ages and backgrounds to easily acquire new knowledge and skills through online courses as well as in-person learning opportunities.

In June, Bendable debuted in South Bend, Indiana, promising to forge a “city of lifelong learning,” while making the community more resilient in the face of a fast-changing economy. Our plan is to expand to more cities in 2021.

It is an initiative that Peter Drucker would have surely applauded. He began writing about society’s transition from an industrial age to a knowledge age more than 60 years ago. But he cautioned that it wouldn’t be easy “to build continuous learning into the job and into the organization.”

“Lifelong learning…requires that learning be alluring,” Drucker wrote, “indeed that it become a high satisfaction in itself, if not something the individual craves.”

In South Bend, thousands of residents have come to Bendable in the first few months to access learning resources from 19 local and national content partners. But it’s more than having a great catalog of courses that is motivating them. They are also attracted by a strong sense of trust, which was nurtured over a long period by the Drucker Institute team getting to know the people and organizations of South Bend; listening to them to understand exactly what they need to learn and want to learn and how they like to learn; and designing the system with them in close collaboration.

It is a tack that makes us different. Many players in the space are attempting to produce digital platforms that can link job seekers with credential-bearing educational providers and then line them up in a new career—all of it at the click of a button or two.

Bendable, by contrast, isn’t powered by an algorithm; it is powered by community.

Before people felt compelled to use the term “stakeholder capitalism” (or “conscious capitalism” or “inclusive capitalism” or “citizen’s capitalism,” as it is variously called) they simply spoke of “capitalism.”

During the 1950s and ’60s, it was widely held that a corporation had a responsibility to deliver value to everyone it touched. “The job of management,” Standard Oil Chairman Frank Abrams declared, “is to maintain an equitable and working balance among the claims of the various directly affected interest groups—stockholders, employees, customers and the public at large.”

But in the 1970s, dissenters began to make a very different case: The interests of those who own a company’s stock should always come first. Within a decade, this was the new consensus. And it has pretty much been that way since then. “We work for our shareholders,” American Airlines CEO Doug Parker said last year. “Our job is to make sure that we’re maximizing value for them.”

And yet, over the past five to 10 years, shareholder primacy has faced a growing backlash among scholars, policymakers and certain business leaders who see that this position has led companies to focus inordinately on short-term profits.

In turn, they say, the obsession with quarterly earnings and daily share price has contributed to exploding income inequality and

environmental degradation, and it has even undermined corporations’ own ability to innovate.

The Drucker Institute has been among those helping to make this case. Through our company rankings and a related financial index, we have used the rigor of good data science to show the tremendous value that is generated when management can effectively serve their shareholders, yes, but also their employees, customers and the greater community.

As Peter Drucker wrote in 1988, far too much in society “depends on the economic fortunes of large enterprises to subordinate them completely to the interests of any one group, including shareholders.”

We still have a long way to go until stakeholder capitalism becomes just “capitalism” again. But we’re getting closer all the time.

Just because a movement has been around for a while doesn’t mean that it has grown old. Such is the case with “Reinventing Government,” which was made famous by a highly influential 1992 book of that name by veteran city manager Ted Gaebler and journalist David Osborne. The following year, Vice President Al Gore spearheaded an effort to reform the way the government operates. It included “reinvention teams” and “reinvention laboratories” within different federal agencies.

Peter Drucker’s fingerprints were all over this. Gaebler and Osborne called Drucker “perhaps the single most influential thinker” in shaping their views. And in 1994, Drucker addressed federal officials in Washington as part of the vice president’s initiative, imploring those in attendance to continue focusing on achieving high performance and better serving the public—not just slashing costs; to instill the discipline of continuous improvement; and to set benchmarks, measure results and hold officials accountable for meeting them.

“What you have accomplished is remarkable and important,” Drucker told his audience. “It is the first step. It is time to start work on the next ones.”

In the decades since then, many government leaders have done just that. Although the term “Reinventing Government” is used less frequently these days than it once was, its tenets remain integral to a number of programs dedicated to lifting the performance of public sector officials.

Among them is our own Drucker Playbook for the Public Sector. It trains government employees by sharing Peter Drucker’s most indispensable insights on management and leadership and provides them with tools for effectiveness. Since 2016, when it was launched, the Drucker Playbook has been used by 17 cities across the United States, as well as by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Reserve Bank of India.

One organization that has used the Playbook is the fire department in Memphis, Tennessee. Recently, the department’s point person on the project,

Ronny Beasley, took a new job: to be chief of the fire department in La Vergne, just outside Nashville. It’s a transition that Beasley believes owes a lot to the Drucker Playbook, which opened his eyes to new possibilities and to his own inner strengths.

Two months into the new job, which he describes as drinking from a “five-inch hose” (firefighters are precise about this sort of thing), Beasley sat down for an interview to talk about his experiences with the Playbook.

Nobody knows exactly who coined the term “social innovation,” but

it is quite clear who was among the first to discuss its importance in addressing the myriad challenges of the world: Peter Drucker.

“We need social innovation,” Drucker wrote in his 1959 book, Landmarks of Tomorrow, “more than we need technological innovation.”

Today, of course, the concept of social innovation is so widely understood that the Stanford Social Innovation Review is published without people wondering what sorts of articles they’ll find on its pages. The Social Innovation Research Center, the Sol Price Center for Social Innovation at the University of Southern California and the Cambridge Centre for Social Innovation do their work without a lot of need for explanation.

In the time between Drucker’s original ruminations and the emergence of today’s social innovation movement, much has evolved. Originally, the social innovations of which Drucker wrote were all products of government or business: the Marshall Plan, commercial insurance and myriad other breakthroughs. Now, a third arena has come to play a leading role—namely, the social sector.

Drucker was ahead of his time here, as well, concentrating on the need for effective nonprofit management when few others were paying attention. “Nonprofit institutions need innovation as much as businesses or governments,” he wrote. “And we know how to do it.”

To Drucker, a crucial ingredient in fostering innovation—the thing that’s new—is to stop doing those things that have become obsolete.

“To call abandonment an ‘opportunity’ may come as a surprise,” Drucker wrote. “Yet planned, purposeful abandonment of the old and of the unrewarding is a prerequisite to successful pursuit of the new and highly promising. Above all, abandonment is the

key to innovation—both because it frees the necessary resources and because it stimulates the search for the new that will replace the old.”

That is why our long-standing program for nonprofit leaders, the $100,000 Drucker Prize, asked social sector leaders to learn about planned abandonment as a part of the application process.

It is also why we have decided to sunset the Drucker Prize and replace it with something that, we believe, will have an even greater impact.

Next year, we will launch a new program called Spring Cleaning in conjunction with the Metro United Way of Louisville, Kentucky, which serves more than 100 nonprofit organizations. Participants will go through a one-day workshop on planned abandonment. We hope to eventually scale Spring Cleaning to other United Way chapters across the country.

Before we do that, however, we want to pay tribute to the dozens of remarkable organizations whose contributions to social innovation earned them the Drucker Prize. Awarded for each of the past 28 years, it recognized the nonprofit that our judges determined best met Peter Drucker’s definition of innovation: “change that creates a new dimension of performance.”