A Year with Peter Drucker - 52 Weeks of Coaching for Leadership Effectiveness

Week 14

Control by Mission and Strategy, Not by Hierarchy

Introduction

I wrote the book Lasting Value: Lessons from a Century of Agility at Lincoln Electric (2000), in which I studied three manufacturing companies known for their productivity and incentive systems and overall enlightened approach to managing their employees. The primary company, Lincoln Electric, a welding company with headquarters in Cleveland, Ohio, was then celebrating a century of successful operations.

Lincoln Electric was very slow to move into foreign operations while its competitors were aggressively operating in the United States. Early on it built plants in Canada and Australia, but it had no operations in South America, Europe, or Asia. As it tried to build manufacturing ...