Page 100 - The Drucker Lectures

PART V

1980s

rucker purists would probably cite his 1985 book Innovation and
DEntrepreneurship as the decade’s publishing highlight. But two other
titles truly stand out: The Last of All Possible Worlds and The Temptation
to Do Good. For these are novels—testaments to the fact that Drucker
saw himself, first and foremost, as a writer (more than as a professor or
a consultant or a “management guru,” a label he loathed). These works
of fiction also underscore Drucker’s notion that “management is a liberal
art,” and, as such, its practice should be informed by lessons of history,
sociology, theology, psychology, literature, and more. Drucker himself was
a polymath, as likely to read Jane Austen as Joseph Schumpeter, and he
systematically drew on all of the branches of learning that he could. “Every
three or four years I pick a new subject,” he explained. “It may be Japanese
art; it may be economics. Three years of study are by no means enough
to master a subject, but they are enough to understand it. So for more
than 60 years I have kept on studying one subject at a time. That not only
has given me a substantial fund of knowledge. It has also forced me to
be open to new disciplines and new approaches and new methods—for
every one of the subjects I have studied makes different assumptions and
employs a different methodology.” Certainly, Drucker’s keen grasp of his-
tory fed his anger about what he viewed as a most unfortunate hallmark of
the ’80s: escalating corporate greed. He railed against king-size CEO pay.
And he excoriated hostile takeover artists and Wall Street traders whose
short-term mindset was anything but Drucker-like; he called them “Balkan
peasants stealing each other’s sheep” and “pigs gorging at the trough.”

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