Page 12 - The Drucker Lectures

INTRODUCTION

ou can picture him perched on the edge of a classroom table, peering
Ythrough thick glasses at the students who hang on his every word.
His baritone voice washes over the room, his Austrian accent as thick as
a Sachertorte.
He doesn’t refer to any written notes. But every now and again, his
eyes roll back in his head and he pauses, almost like a computer down-
loading a store of information, before returning to his point and under-
scoring it with a new set of facts and figures.
His protean mind meanders from topic to topic—a discussion on cost
accounting bleeding into a riff on Mesopotamian city-states before he
veers into a lesson on the history of higher education or health care. But,
somehow, he magically ties it all together in the end. In his hands, discur-
siveness becomes a fine art. And he delivers the entire talk with charm
and humor and a genial style that, as one pupil has put it, recasts “the
chilly lecture hall to the size and comfort of a living room.”
Peter Drucker, widely hailed as the greatest management thinker of
all time, is best known for the 39 books he wrote. Among them are such
classics as Concept of the Corporation (1946); The Practice of Manage-
ment (1954); The Effective Executive (1967); Management: Tasks, Respon-
sibilities, Practices (1973); Innovation and Entrepreneurship (1985); and
Management Challenges for the 21st Century (1999).
But those who had the pleasure of attending a Drucker lecture, be-
fore he died in 2005 just shy of his ninety-sixth birthday, got to see an-
other side of him. Featuring lectures from the dawn of the television age
straight through to the Internet age, from World War II to the aftermath of
September 11, 2001, from the ascent into office of Chiang Kai-shek to the
emergence of China as a global economic power, this book is designed to
provide a taste of what that was like.

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