Cracker Barrel restaurants have been experiencing a massive customer hemorrhage and plummeting stock thanks to self-inflicted wounds.
Company leaders decided to replace the traditional rustic rather corny logo of an older fellow from the country leaning on a barrel. Enter consulting firm Prophet, which produced a sleek, symmetrical and bloodless logo. The old guy was erased. Stores were also redesigned to remove the imitation country store atmosphere in favor of a corporate-style vision.
Disaster followed. Customers vanished. Stock price nose-dived.
Cracker Barrel has fired Prophet and is frantically trying to return to its established atmosphere and imagery.
Management guru Peter Drucker would be surprised by none of this, and a massive corporate misstep is a good time to review his important legacy.
Drucker’s prominence began not long after World War II with his study of General Motors, “The Concept of the Corporation.” The book became a bestseller and had a marked impact on that company, though internal reactions were far from uniformly positive.
One GM executive who appreciated the study was Charles Wilson, who became secretary of defense in the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. After achieving the Korean War armistice, Ike was nevertheless concerned that badly weakened South Korea would soon fall to communism.
Groups were organized by Eisenhower to plan the postwar reconstruction and development of the Republic of Korea. Drucker was recruited for the group focused on education.
Drucker maintained government ties and steadily became more influential in business and visible publicly. He has never been widely taught in business schools, but developed a successful consulting practice and remains extensively read by actual business people and the wider public. He did not use statistical analysis and warned against business fads.
I learned about him while attending the U.S. Army infantry officers’ school at Ft. Benning Georgia in the early 1970s. Army Chief of Staff General William Westmoreland had completed a program at Harvard Business School and became committed to effective management. One result was supplementing military instruction with Drucker films.
Yet Westmoreland strongly — and rightly — resisted some Nixon administration officials’ efforts to model our planned all-volunteer military on business corporations. Military service at the core is inherently different.
Professor Drucker, then at Claremont Graduate University in Southern California, generously met twice with me regarding planning the Clausen Center for World Business at Carthage College in Wisconsin. The namesake is alumnus Tom Clausen, who led both Bank of America and the World Bank.
Drucker, from Germany, emigrated in the European tide fleeing Nazism. After a teaching stint at Sarah Lawrence College, another at Bennington College and two decades at NYU Business School, he and his wife moved to Claremont.
He agreed to meet only after declining twice. A third letter, describing the interdisciplinary character of Carthage’s teaching, finally opened the door.
“Life is interdisciplinary, Professor Cyr,” he said when at last we met.
In a wide-ranging talk, he mentioned working with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. U.S. demand for scientists is spurring immigration, including substantial numbers of women who find career opportunities to be greater here. This point applies well beyond science.
Drucker’s perceptiveness about human nature and interpersonal dynamics, especially in organizational contexts; skepticism about organization charts revealing essentials; general preference for taking things one step at a time rather than turning things upside down; counsel on the dangers of considering only the numbers — that data is a tool, but not necessarily primary; these and related insights account for his remarkable enduring impact.
Cracker Barrel execs should take note and calm down.