Page 66 - The Drucker Lectures

PART IV

1970s

f all of Peter Drucker’s achievements—advising captains of industry
Oand heads of state, coming up with the term “knowledge worker,”
winning the Presidential Medal of Freedom—the most remarkable may be
this: In 1974, his 800-plus-page tome, Management: Tasks, Responsibili-
ties, Practices, vaulted past The Joy of Sex on the national best-seller list.
Many authors would have considered publishing a definitive work such as
Management the capstone of their career, especially if they had been writ-
ing for more than four decades already. Not Drucker. Astonishingly, the
1970s marked not an end for him, but a fresh start of sorts; two-thirds
of his 39 books would be published after he reached age 65. Drucker
would later trace his indefatigability to the 1920s, when he worked as a
trainee at a cotton export firm in Hamburg, Germany. Every week, Drucker
would escape the drudgery of his job by going to the opera, and it was
there that he heard Falstaff by the nineteenth-century Italian composer
Giuseppe Verdi. “I was totally overwhelmed by it,” Drucker recalled. But
what impressed him most was when he later discovered that Verdi’s mas-
terpiece—“with its gaiety, its zest for life, and its incredible vitality,” as
Drucker put it—had been written by a man of 80. “All my life as a musi-
cian,” Verdi declared, “I have striven for perfection. It has always eluded
me. I surely had an obligation to make one more try.” Drucker said that
this vow from Verdi became his “lodestar,” helping inspire him to write
and write and write.

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