Drucker on Marketing: Lessons from the World's Most Influential Business Thinker

Chapter 5Marketing Is Leadership

One of Drucker’s far-reaching and integrative ideas is little known. It is that good leadership is essentially marketing. He actually called leadership a “marketing job.”¹ Unfortunately, many leadership scholars and practitioners ignore this concept or assume that it has to do entirely with selling and persuasion. While persuasion and making sales and marketing, too, are certainly a part of leadership, this idea is based on Drucker’s view that all knowledge workers are partners in an organization. As partners, they cannot be simply ordered around or managed. They must be led, and this integrates persuasion with strategic thinking, segmentation, and many other elements of marketing. So the practice of leadership, ...