Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

by Daniel H. Pink

Big Idea: Self-management. “Drucker’s primary contribution is not a single idea,” Jim Collins once wrote, “but rather an entire body of work that has one gigantic advantage: nearly all of it is essentially right.” Drucker coined the term “knowledge worker,” foresaw the rise of the nonprofit sector, and was among the first to stress the primacy of the customer in business strategy. But although he’s best known for his thoughts on managing businesses, toward the end of his career Drucker signaled the next frontier: self-management. With the rise of individual longevity and the decline of job security, he argued, individuals have to think hard about where their strengths lie, what they can contribute, and how they can improve their own performance. “The need to manage oneself,” he wrote shortly before he died in 2005, is “creating a revolution in human affairs.”