Unquestionably, one of the key management thinkers of the 20th century (something that can be said with more confidence now than it could have been stated just a few months ago) is Peter Drucker, the author of a vast array of books since his first was published in 1933. That Drucker has
been ahead of the prevailing wisdom is made evident, for example, by the time
of one of his books: The Age of Discontinuity: Guidelines to Our Changing Society.
While that title would be sound if the book appeared in print just last week,
it was published more than 30 years ago, in 1968. Drucker knew what was going
on before most people were aware that something was happening.
John E. Flaherty
has long been a student (and friend) of Drucker. To help provide people with a
synthesis of Drucker’s voluminous output, he has written Peter Drucker: Shaping
the Managerial Mind (Jossey-Bass; $27.00). To be sure, this is Flaherty on Drucker,
not the unalloyed material, but Flaherty provides a solid understanding of Drucker’s
intellectual and observational development throughout the better part of the 20th
century.
One of the more interesting aspects of the book is not, say, what Drucker
discovered while writing Concept of the Corporation (1946), a ground-breaking
book that examines a single corporation. Drucker had looked long and hard for
a major corporation that would open itself up to analytical study (and that would
provide financial support). General Motors came through. Flaherty writes, “He
had no interest in General Motors in particular or the automobile industry in
general; his ulterior goal was to use the company as a means to understand the
conflict between industrial efficiency and social harmony. For example, his major
concern was with the dignity and status of the individual employee and the role
of the corporation in satisfying this end of industrial citizenship and social
community.” Once again, here is an example of Drucker dealing with concepts that
are still unresolved issues today. As it turned out, not surprisingly, “Despite
the fact that Concept of the Corporation was widely considered a probusiness book,
it received a hostile reception from its financial patron. It was resoundingly
criticized within the organization for portraying as vulnerabilities what GM considered
strengths. Considering the book unfair in its criticism and decidedly antibusiness
in tone, the company’s official policy was to treat its publication as a nonevent—ignoring
its accompanying publicity, prohibiting its purchase as a gift for suppliers,
dissociating the company from its opinions, and censoring any internal or external
discussion of its merits.” Sound familiar?
Although anyone can learn a lot about management thinking from the book, there is, perhaps, a more important lesson. Throughout his career, Drucker has been a journalist, political scientist, economist, statistician, historian, business consultant, and teacher. Drucker has spent his
life being curious about an array of things, learning about them, thinking about
them. Far too many of us spend our time concentrating on one thing: we give up
breadth for depth. But depth without context is sometimes nothing more than a
deep hole and there isn’t usually a whole lot down there.—GSV
