THE WORLD ACCORDING TO PETER DRUCKER
By Jack Beatty
The Free Press, 204 pages, $25
What becomes a legend most? Hint: It isn’t modesty. Peter Drucker, the business consultant, author and academic who can lay claim to having been the original influence behind the entire field of management and organizational studies he has dominated for more than a half-century, was already famous when the present generation of CEOs was still on its training wheels. What Billy Graham is to American presidents, Peter Drucker is to the board chairmen of the largest U.S. corporations.
But author Jack Beatty doesn’t have to tell us that. Peter Drucker himself is happy to remind everyone he invented the concept of privatization; envisioned a new class of “knowledge workers,” whose value in the marketplace is based on what they know (and how well they communicate it) rather than on what they produce; foresaw the future of midlife second careers more than 30 years ago; and defined the philosophy of management as the central driving force in a “society of organizations.”
Nor does Drucker think of himself as just a member of the home team. He readily admits his services are available to the global business community that he also claims to have helped create. In a postscript to a 1993 edition of his model study of General Motors, the 1945 “Concept of the Corporation,” Drucker does not hesitate to call attention to “My popularity in Japan, where I am credited with substantial responsibility for the emergence of the country as a major economic power.”
None of that, of course, leaves much wiggle room for an outsider. Nevertheless, Beatty, Drucker’s editor at the Atlantic Monthly and an accomplished biographer with a penchant for roguish and difficult types (his last profile was of Boston’s Irish boss, James Michael Curley), makes a game effort in this artful, respectful primer. Beatty uses modesty as a counterfoil to ego. He even courteously thanks the Druckers for taking “time out of their busy lives” to answer his “rookie” questions, as if he were the neighbor boy delivering milk to the back door.
Not that Beatty’s efforts were always repaid in kind by the Great One. When Beatty ventures to ask Drucker, for example, how he explains what he does, he gets a gruff, professorial brushoff: “I write.” And when he chances another gentle query as to what Drucker might do in his leisure time, he is met with the kind of roar the Wizard of Oz used on the Cowardly Lion: “What leisure time?” You have the feeling the Druckers never asked Beatty to stay over for dinner. For much of this book, you can dislike Drucker’s Old World classroom imperiousness as much as you feel sorry for Beatty’s cap-in-hand status, not always a winning combination. Every once in a while, Beatty admits apologetically to feeling like he’s “toiling” through “the long march” of Drucker’s work.
Beatty’s persistence and deference, however, do pay off, carefully peeling back today’s Peter Drucker to his youthful idealism, a romantic dream of a postwar America shaped by the dynamism of its business growth, and ultimately a broken heart when business turns out in the latter years of this century to behave just like, well, business. It is an awesome, affecting portrait of a teacher and the pupil whose skills he could perfect but whose heart he could not change.
Until Beatty showed up at Drucker’s back door, the master had largely been the primary keeper of his own legend. For nearly three decades, Drucker has shooed away all unwanted intruders with a standard postcard: “Mr. Peter F. Drucker greatly appreciates your kind interest, but is unable to contribute articles or forewords; comment on manuscripts or books; take part in panels or symposia; join committees or boards of any kind; answer questionnaires; give interviews; and appear on radio and television.” A quite possibly apocryphal anecdote has circulated in the business community for years of a troubled CEO who sent a full and confidential account of his company’s problems to Drucker’s home in California only to receive a copy of Drucker’s bibliography in return.
When Drucker sailed into New York Harbor in the mid-1930s at age 26, he had already lived through one world war, the approach of another through the rise of German fascism, and witnessed the collapse of the old European political order. According to his own precocious memory, he was only 5 when he heard his father downstairs with other eminences in their house in Vienna (among them a future president of Czechoslovakia) proclaiming, “This is the end not just of Austria, but of civilization.”
American industry in the prewar ’30s was not much different from the country’s small-town farming culture: rural, secretive and profoundly anti-intellectual. By accident and circumstance, the emigre Europeans of Drucker’s generation seemed to be imported to do America’s thinking for it. Understandably skeptical of new political orders, Drucker found instead a far more powerful new force breaking through the earth–the assembling of a mighty, national, wartime industrial economy. Not only did he see the profound implications to come, he found almost nothing in the nation’s libraries about how to organize, manage or even comprehend the social nature of such power.
Drucker saw in great national corporations the transforming potential for more than just the ability to produce things and make money–a dream that the young European apparently grasped more readily than the owners. When Drucker first proposed his idea for a pioneering organizational study within Westinghouse, the chairman banned him from the premises as a Bolshevik. Even after granting Drucker unprecedented access throughout GM, its famed chairman, Alfred P. Sloan, disowned “Concept of the Corporation” as dangerously misguided and radical in its advocacy of such notions as labor and management alliances, worker responsibility in self-governing plant units and, horrors, a guaranteed annual wage. Sloan even backhandedly complimented Drucker for prodding him to write his own memoirs, mainly just to “set the record straight.”
Throughout more than five decades of Drucker’s writings, there remains this European-bred idealism of a social democracy within the business organization, in particular Drucker’s constant theme of corporate “legitimacy.” “No social power can endure unless it is legitimate power,” Drucker was already prescribing in some of his first writings in the early 1940s. “Free enterprise cannot be justified as being good for business. It can be justified only as being good for society. . . . Capitalism is being attacked not because it is inefficient or misguided, but because it is cynical. And indeed a society based on the assertion that private vices become public benefits cannot endure, no matter how great its benefits.” In Beatty’s summary words, Drucker “discusses economic life in terms of values, integrity, character, knowledge, vision, responsibility, self-control, social integration, teamwork, community, competence, social responsibility, the quality of life, self-fulfillment, leadership, duty, purpose, dignity, meaning–but rarely money.”
Although Drucker’s managerial edicts could be lofty and theoretical, they often had an earthy, homespun and witty side. Yogi Berra once sought out Drucker for help with a sensitive management problem on the New York Mets, coping with the hordes of money-grabbing groupies preying on his team’s young and inexperienced ballplayers. Drucker’s recommendation: Recruit a retired Army sergeant–or a former nun–as a chaperone.
In the end, despite a handful of “Drucker’s children” among a diminishing number of enlightened corporate managers, there is the sense that money won out anyway. After a decade of a mindless gold rush among America’s senior executives toward their corporate treasuries while the wages of their employees have mainly stood still, Drucker’s noble ideal of a social democracy in the workplace has begun to come apart.
In a 1996 interview with a newfangled computer magazine, Drucker scornfully dismissed any justification for today’s corporate behavior. “A lot of top managers enjoy cruelty,” he said. “There is no doubt that we are in a period in which you are a hero if you are cruel. What’s absolutely unforgivable is the financial benefit top management people get for laying off people. There is no excuse for it. No justification. This is morally and socially unforgivable, and we will pay a heavy price for it.” In even starker terms in recent years Drucker has gloomily come close to admitting the failure of his once lofty vision: “Corporations once built to last like pyramids are now more like tents.”
It is perhaps no surprise that, as Drucker now approaches his 90th birthday, he has increasingly begun to refocus his faith in another sort of dynamism, the rise of nonprofit organizations. Since Drucker still prefers his social canvases on the epic side, like the moviemakers who were his fellow ship passengers from Europe, he conjures up new images of 100 million Americans volunteering an average three hours a week, therefore making such nonprofit social organizations “the largest employer in America.” He has signed on by endowing his own Drucker Foundation, conferring an annual $25,000 award for nonprofit innovation.
If the latter years of the 20th Century may seem to have failed Peter Drucker, there is little doubt that his published works will survive, as much for the hard core of their determinant values as the analytical tools he invented. In a rare unguarded moment with Beatty, Drucker actually allowed as how after a lifetime of studying large corporations he could never bring himself to work inside one. “They bore me to tears,” he confessed. In the world according to Peter Drucker, there is apparently still room for only one model citizen.
