Peter Drucker - Managing in the Next Society

First published 2002 by Butterworth-Heinemann
Classic Drucker Collection edition 2007

Published 2013 by Routledge
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Copyright 2002, Peter F. Drucker. Published by Taylor & Francis. All rights reserved.

Foreword Copyright 2007 Alistair Mant and Cary Copper. All rights reserved.

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ISBN-13: 978-0-7506-8505-4 (pbk)
ISBN-13: 978-0-080-94237-7 (ebk)

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Peter F. Drucker
19092005

To all managers and leaders, students and teachers who have benefited from Peters teaching .

Doris Drucker

I am writing this appreciation in harness with Professor Cary Cooper an ex-pat American in Europe. I am an ex-pat Australian in Europe and our subject is an ex-pat Austrian in the USA. So its no surprise that our main theme is Peter Druckers cosmopolitanism. After the Second World War, he was virtually the only influential American writer on business who was not entrapped in self-congratulatory admiration of the American way of doing business. He befriended big business in order to offer it constructive criticism. He never, quite, disgraced himself in the eyes of the corporate behemoths, though his instincts were invariably mischievous.

I met Peter Drucker but twice and I agree with Jim Collins that what marked him out was his relentless interest in all that was going on around him. He was one of the best and sharpest listeners I have ever met. At the time of writing, I eagerly anticipate sharing a platform with his widow Doris later this year. The Australian Institute of Management in its great wisdom has seen fit to dedicate its national convention this year (2007) to a celebration of Peters work. No one should be surprised to learn that the title of Doris memoir is Invent Radium or Ill pull Your Hair . I am not making this up; what kind of wonderful woman would Drucker marry anyway?

I was fortunate enough to meet up with Peter in Claremont College, many years ago now. I was visiting UCLA (my old alma mater) and other universities in the greater LA area, intending to see what was happening at Pomona Claremont Colleges in the business and psychology fields. But just by chance, I literally ran into him and then ended up spending nearly the afternoon talking to him about every topic under the proverbial sun! Prior to meeting him, I had a stereotypical view of him which was wholly transformed after this chance meeting. Rather than being on transmit, extolling his own virtues and achievements, he was totally on receive, listening intently to me, asking me about what was happening in the UK and Europe, and not only about business and management, but about politics, ethics, lifestyles, etc. He struck me at once as a polymath, very well educated and interested in life in its broadest sense, with management and business not being his only passionalthough I felt his abiding interest in management was about action, getting things done, whether it was in the context of a private sector business or a hospital or a school. After only a couple of hours with this man, I was reminded of what Mark Twain wrote: Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you too can somehow be great. He had that effect on me, and I can remember it to this day!

The Peter Drucker story is well-known how a young Austrian journalist promised himself he would quit Germany (to where he moved in 1927) if Hitler came to power and how that man became the guru of gurus in the new field of management. It remains to place him in historical context remember, he was born into the Hapsburg empire and wrote in English continuously from Lend Lease (through which the USA tightened its grip on world trade) right through to Enron, WorldCom and other embarrassments to the American business establishment. As usual, he saw it all coming. He understood the broad thrust of global history and he grasped the importance of context that is, that nothing much is self-determined by individuals, or by firms or even by countries. In the end, the environment shapes you.

That is why Drucker styled himself a social ecologist. In truth, he was one of the pre-eminent systems thinkers of the post-war years, at a time when most management writing was admonitory. He invariably drew attention to the way that systems (unfortunately) functioned in reality rather than to the supposedly correct rules of the game that managers were meant to follow. His famous list of the main managerial tasks (plan, organize, motivate, control, develop, and so on) was based on observation of what effective managers actually did, not on what Drucker or anybody in the Academy decided they should do.

Through his friendship with Sir William Beveridge (the principal architect of the National Health Service in Britain) he saw that the NHS would not (indeed did not) achieve true joined-up integration unless health service areas were aligned with local government. They never were. But Drucker also understood that all national health schemes, whatever their high pretensions, remain insurance schemes at base. So he was that rare beast an economist who really understood complex systems with people in them. The friendship with Beveridge is instructive for it seems Drucker knew everybody who really mattered. He was drawn to them, and they to him. But remember he grew up in a networking household in suburban Vienna; his lawyer/economist father hosted the well-connected dinners for economists and civil servants on Monday and his doctor mother hosted the dinners later in the week for musicians, physicists and other intellectuals. Freud was a distant family friend.