So it's late on Sunday night when I finish reading Inside Drucker's Brain, by Jeffrey A. Krames. I'm tired but determined to finish it. I get to the Epilogue and finally learn about Drucker's life from his childhood on up to the present. Half-way through, it hits me: he might never have had the opportunity to make the contribution to the world of management that he did.
I knew he was Jewish and I knew he was from Vienna, Austria. But I hadn't put two and two together until I read that he and his fellow Jewish faculty members of the University of Frankfurt were told they were being fired and that if they tried to come back to work, they would be sent to a concentration camp. Drucker then made the decision to leave there. It was 1939. He escaped to England and found his way to the United States.
The stories of those who escaped always hit me like a ton of bricks and I end up thinking about all of the people who did not escape. Sunday night I wondered how the business world would be different today without his voice.
I probably began reading Peter Drucker's books when I was working in the business news section of The Arizona Daily Star in the late 1980s and early 90s. He is considered to be the father of modern management and he may have been one of the first people to use the term "organization" to refer to a company. Describing the impact he has had on the world of business in the last 60 years is nearly impossible. One of his first books on the topic, The Future of Industrial Man, was published in 1942 and he never stopped thinking and writing until his final work, The Effective Executive In Action, was published in 2005.
I recommend Krames' book. I enjoyed the way he interspersed Drucker's theories with the experience of having spent time with him before he died in 2007.
I found a copy of A Class with Drucker: The lost lessons of the world's greatest management teacher,by William A. Cohen, in a bookstore this weekend and The Definitive Drucker, by Elizabeth Edersheim. is sitting on the shelf at my library. I'll check it out tomorrow.
