 One of the three things I wanted to do after I became financially independent was to work for Peter Ferdinand Drucker. Preferably in a job that allowed me to see how he worked, what he read, how he thought, and finally, how he translated them into articles and books that influenced top leaders and executives. Of corporations. Of non-profits. Of countries. He always seemed “just there, around the corner”, so there was no hurry. Yes, he was in his mid-nineties and the spectre of mortality did raise its head. But then, Drucker was so young, so vibrant, so full of new ideas. How could he age, leave alone die? But on November 11, eight days before he turned 96, he passed away, leaving behind a work that will live on till civilisations do. It will influence more thinkers and leaders than any other single individual’s work. Best known as the ‘father of management’, he had become a subject, a course, if not a field, in himself. Something like Plato, Keynes or Ved Vyasa. His work sweeps from history to art, finance to technology, organisations to people. All of which will continue to breath life into ideas. As someone who has been following management and organisational behaviour in particular and seeking the unseen in general, I can say without batting an eyelid that even at 95, Drucker was the youngest business, management, societal and economic thinker alive. And the youngest futurist, even though he claimed not to be one. But what he wrote, the ideas he nourished were pretty much like looking into a reverse rear view mirror that showed a crystal-clear future. How else could he have written books like The Post-Capitalist Society (1993) and articles like ‘The future that has already happened’? In this preface to his 1998 book, Peter Drucker on the Profession of Management, he predicted that before 2010 the age at which people will actually retire in developed economies will be 75; that economic growth will not necessarily come from increasing inputs, but from increasing productivity; that there will be no single dominant economic power because no country will have the population base to support such a role. Knowledge, he said, makes resources mobile, and this will change the way organisations run. And 1,285 words later, he concludes: “Predictions? No. These are the implications of a future that has already happened.” This is his style. From his first book, The End of Economic Man: The Origins of Totalitarianism (1939) to his last, The Effective Executive in Action (to be published early next year), the one hallmark of the man has been his being way ahead in observing, capturing, analysing new trends and fresh ideas and translating them into insights that are digestible, touchable by the rest of us. Three full decades before ‘knowledge’ and ‘information’ became the buzzwords of intellectual currency, in mid-to- late-1990s, Drucker had coined the terms, ‘knowledge worker’ and ‘knowledge society’ and stamped their importance, their place in a future that we’re living in today. Over the three-quarters-of-a-century long career, much of which he echoes through his life - he says executives should be ready for a career spanning three or four decades or that the career of individuals is getting to be longer than those of the companies they work for - he’s written 39 books, each a masterpiece. Mathematically, that’s about one book in two years. Drucker is a great addiction I got hooked on to rather late, with his Drucker on Asia: A dialogue between Peter Drucker and Isao Nakauchi (1997). This dialogue between Drucker and the Japanese retail tycoon was so engrossing that I sat up reading this book delving into issues of disaster, the role of merchants in it and the rise of China, reaching my office bleary- eyed the next morning. The most endearing part of that book, something I later excerpted while launching the first edition of a magazine, was the seven things Drucker did to reach where he had. We titled the excerpt, ‘What makes Peter Drucker Peter Drucker’ and we got many letters telling us how life-changing this three-page piece was. A sample: seeking perfection in work because Gods notice it (learnt from Verdi and Phidias), understanding what’s required from a new job and not continuing to do the old job (from a senior partner of a securities firm), and knowing that finally what you’ll be remembered for is the difference you make in lives of people (from Schumpeter). But what I found most appealing is what he learnt as a journalist: to explore new subjects. “Every three or four years I pick a new subject. 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.” The result was that in the next few years I ended up reading most of what Drucker had written. The technological innovation of the Internet, which Drucker likened to the railways and not electricity like other thinkers did, helped and like a devoted pupil, I followed Drucker as he wrote articles and books, gave interviews. Anything I could lay my eyes on that had his signature. Google wasn’t born then, but on Yahoo, my most commonly-used search string would have been ‘Drucker’. I was then editing a financial magazine and married many of his insights with stock market research. Understanding risk, in this most primal, most basic form, for instance: “It is no accident that the word ‘risk’ itself in the original Arabic meant ‘earning one’s daily bread.” I found myself relating subjects as far out as cosmology to assess the potential of economies and companies. Innovation and Entrepreneurship: Practice and Principles (1985), a gripping account - possibly the only one - of the subject gave me direction into evaluating ‘new economy’ businesses. This consumption had one side effect. Drucker likes to experiment with his ideas. So, you will find him writing for magazines like the Atlantic Monthly and The Economist, which helped him get feedback. With which he would sharpen the articles, which finally would get published as a collection in a book. I would find this rather irritating, almost like being cheated out of something fresh. But which journalist can complain the weight of his ideas like planning for the second half of one’s life, the growth and mushrooming of non-profits, faith in the free market but with reservations about capitalism and so on? Never did I imagine I would be writing his obit. A book review, yes. An analysis of his work, sure. An interview - absolutely! But as I write these words, I feel a dull aching in my heart, an uneasy vacuum when I realise that this consultant’s consultant, this guru’s guru, this man who has directly influenced the likes of Churchill and Welch, the 20th century’s most influential philosopher has gone without leaving an intellectual heir. He will rest in peace, but his ideas will continue to drive the rest of us. |
