If you want to understand what's going on in front of your eyes, read management theorist Peter Drucker's essays of decades ago. Drucker has always been way ahead of his time.

Back in the late 1960s he coined the phrase “knowledge worker” to describe what has become the driving force of what we now call the knowledge economy. Twenty years later, he began to focus on the not-for-profit sector and on “the transformation of the nonprofit volunteer to unpaid professional, which may be the most important development in America today.”

Because resources in this sector are so tight, the volunteers who fill these organizations become strategic thinkers and good at getting results; as Drucker points out, this is where a lot of executives find the meaning that is lacking from their day jobs.

Somehow I missed most of that until recent years. I sort of backed into volunteering, acting as judge for several writing awards and for the Discovery Centre science awards. There are a few blurry memories of fundraising dinners for Ducks Unlimited. Then a couple of years ago my daughter, Claire, and I began canvassing for the Canadian Diabetes Association. For the past couple of years, I have attended fundraisers for Phoenix Youth Programs.
This year I seem to have jumped in with both feet, sitting on a committee that oversaw the first-ever Revolution fundraiser for Nova Scotia's Dartmouth General Hospital—a “spin-a-thon” to raise money for the new CAT scanner. Revolution is the brainchild of Dean Hartman, the founder and president of the Nubody's fitness-club chain.

Sitting in on the meetings, I got to see Hartman's hands-on management style. There was a lot of energy in the group but a few gaps in experience. New members mysteriously showed up in the final weeks to fill some of those gaps.

Since last fall, I have spent far too many hours on the board of the Atlantic Theatre Festival, helping develop a strategy for the renewal of this once brilliant theatre in Wolfville, N.S., that has gone dark over the last couple of years.

I volunteered to head the community liaison committee, the one charged with trying to negotiate a new deal with Acadia University so that the ATF could present a summer production in the Festival Theatre, which 10 years ago had been converted from the old university Ice Palace into a fine theatre, thrust stage

and all. Well, thrust and counter thrust, a deal was struck with the university allowing the Festival Society inside to build sets, rehearse, and prepare for the production of a modern comedy.

On my wish list a few years ago I had put “experience in negotiation,” and this adventure was all of that. How much I learned from this volunteer role, as Drucker had predicted I would. The following paragraph contains the theory, as laid out in his 1988 book, The New Realities, from the chapter “What the Nonprofits are Teaching Business.”

“In two areas, strategy and the effectiveness of the board, [nonprofits] are practicing what most American business only preach,” he wrote. “And in the most crucial area—the motivation and productivity of knowledge workers—they are truly pioneers, working out the policies and practices that business will have to learn tomorrow.”

On the management side, nonprofits need a clear mission that is focused on the outside world, a crucial trick many businesses never master. “Successful nonprofits have learned to define clearly what changes outside the organization constitute ‘results' and to focus on them… A clearly defined mission will foster innovative ideas and help others understand why they need to be implemented—however much they fly in the face of tradition.”

Drucker argues that, unlike most large businesses, nonprofits tend to have strong boards whose members are both passionate and knowledgeable about the organization. This makes management easier, and Drucker recommends that business follows suit. In retrospect, this advice is better than the trend toward the unwieldy over-regulation designed to prevent corporate malfeasance and Enron-like self-destruction.

Nonprofits also provide volunteers with the meaningful achievement that is so often missing from their day jobs, which are just about efficiency, says Drucker. They also provide training to these knowledge workers in how to set and achieve goals, lessons they then take back to their workplaces.

Writing back in the 1980s, Drucker saw that as society goes to hell in a handcart and values are forgotten, the not-for-profits provide a strong counterforce. They provide a sense of meaning and a clear-eyed ability to get things done that is often missing from business. This has been my experience, anyway. Once again, Drucker is right on the money—if I can use that phrase.