The Wisdom of Drucker

My favorite quote from Peter Drucker comes from The Effective Executive (written over 40 years ago!!). On page 5, Drucker writes: “The greatest wisdom not applied to action and behavior is meaningless data.”

Quite simply, what Drucker was saying is that any information that you have that doesn’t cause you to change how you behave is useless. So for example, if your organization knows that certain segments of the membership never attend the annual meeting, yet you continue to market to them as if they do, then your knowledge of that is meaningless. It’s useless.

All organizations must have a willingness to change their behavior based on the data they have. The best business intelligence initiative in the world will fail if the organization implementing it refuses to change its actions or behaviors based on what it learns.

So ask yourself: Is your organization willing to change its behavior based on new information?

About Wes Trochlil

For over 30 years, Wes has worked in and with dozens of associations and membership organizations throughout the US, ranging in size from zero staff (all-volunteer) to over 700. In that time Wes has provided a range of consulting services, from general consulting on data management issues to full-scale, association-wide selection and implementation of association management systems.

Scroll to Top