Success Quote by Peter Drucker

Management’s dirtiest secret is hiding in Drucker’s blunt little sentence: in a modern organization, obedience is a fantasy you pay for and rarely receive. “Treat almost anybody as a volunteer” isn’t a sentimental plea for kindness; it’s a hard-edged recognition that most knowledge workers can’t be marched like factory labor. They can comply on paper and still withhold the real asset: judgment, attention, initiative. The labor contract buys time; it doesn’t buy commitment.

Drucker’s intent is practical and quietly radical. If people are effectively volunteers, the manager’s job shifts from supervision to recruitment - every day. You don’t “manage” volunteers by tightening rules; you make the work legible, meaningful, and winnable. You earn discretionary effort through clarity, autonomy, and respect, not fear. That framing also exposes how fragile corporate power can be: the org chart looks solid until you remember that the most valuable employees can exit, disengage, or simply stop thinking.

The subtext is almost accusatory: if your culture requires coercion to function, it’s already failing. Drucker wrote in an era when the “knowledge worker” was becoming central, and he anticipated today’s realities - porous loyalty, job-hopping, remote work, and the constant temptation to give employers the minimum viable self. Calling employees “volunteers” is a managerial coping strategy and a moral check: act like people have choices, because they do.