is an affiliate of the drucker school of management
November marks the conclusion
of the Drucker Centennial, the twoyear
observance of the anniversary
of Peter Drucker’s birth (November
19, 1909). By any measure, it has
been a remarkable period of
commemoration and celebration.
From Tokyo to Sao Paolo, from
New York to Beijing, from Los
Angeles to Seoul, many thousands of
people have come
to Centennial
events to listen,
learn and
rededicate
themselves to
Drucker’s ideas
and ideals. On
November 6 in
Claremont, Tom
Peters will deliver
the keynote address for Drucker
Centennial Day. And a month later, a
lineup of prominent management
scholars and executives will gather
in Vienna at the Second Global
Drucker Forum.
What makes all of these events
so special is that they haven’t just
reveled in the past. Rather than
simply honor Drucker’s life, they have
sought to connect his teachings to
some of the most important issues of
today and tomorrow: the crisis on
Wall Street, the need for social
entrepreneurship,
the call for more
responsible
leadership from
all sectors.
Drucker, of
course, wouldn’t
have had it any
other way. After
all, he himself was
always looking out
the window—not the rearview
mirror—as the titles of many of his
books make clear: Managing for the
Rick Wartzman, executive director of
the Drucker Institute, writes a column for
Bloomberg Businessweek online that ties
Peter Drucker’s work to today’s headlines.
For a list of all of his columns, click here.
Rick’s recent “Drucker Difference” columns:
• Churchill and Drucker: Perfect Together October 22, 2010
• Avoid the Economist’s Folly October 12, 2010
• Bank of America’s Self-Imposed Exam September 24, 2010
• Burger King: Start Courting the Noncustomer September 10, 2010
Letter from Claremont
“The Drucker Difference” on Bloomberg Businessweek
Drucker Society Spotlight
How Drucker Societies worldwide are
advancing effective management and
responsible leadership
As Peter Drucker noted in Managing
for the Future, “Innovating organizations
spend neither time nor resources on
defending yesterday.” This insight
informed a recent restructuring of the
Drucker Society Global Network—one
that will provide Drucker Societies around
the globe with greater local autonomy.
The Drucker Societies were founded
with a shared mission: to positively impact
their communities by stimulating effective
management and responsible leadership.
Initially, Societies from places as
diverse as Dallas and Dubai pursued this
mission by delivering a slate of programs
developed in conjunction with the Drucker
Institute.
It didn’t take long, however, for the
Institute to learn from our customers (the
Societies) that a single, centralized source
of program development was inhibiting
Society efforts abroad. Knowing their
Continued on the next page Continued on the next page
claremont graduate university
The Drucker Exchange is our new blog about bettering society through effective management and
responsible leadership. “The Dx” replaces Drucker Apps and features shorter and more frequent postings.
1021 n dartmouth ave, claremont, ca 91711
THE WINDOW “I don’t predict. I just look out the window and see what’s visible but not yet seen.”
— Peter F. Drucker
The newsletter of the Drucker Institute www.druckerinstitute.com Nov/Dec 2010
The Japan Drucker Workshop’s 2009
convention during the Drucker Centennial
is an affiliate of the drucker school of management
Future, The New Realities, Management Challenges for the 21st Century.
With this in mind, we offer you three of our favorite Drucker quotes about the
future—ones that we find particularly inspiring as calls to action:
“Predicting the future can only get you into trouble. The task is to manage what
is there and to work to create what could and should be.”
“The important thing is to identify the ‘future that has already happened’—and
to develop a methodology for perceiving and analyzing these changes.”
“To try to make the future is highly risky. It is less risky, however, than not to try
to make it. A goodly proportion of those attempting . . . will surely not succeed.
But, predictably, no one else will.”
Here’s to the Drucker Centennial—but, even more important, to the decades
yet to come.
Rick Wartzman and Zach First
Executive Director and Managing Director
Learn more about the
Drucker Management Path training
system, and what it can do for the
managers in your organization.
Kenneth and William Hopper,
authors of The Puritan Gift—a Financial
Times Top 10 Business Book of the Year
in 2007—recently
began a stint as
Writers-in-
Residence at the
Drucker Institute.
Their book
traces the origins
and characteristics
of an American
managerial culture
that, over the
course of three
centuries, turned a
handful of small
colonies into the
greatest economic
and political power
on earth.
Among the
book’s most
important contributions to management
scholarship is the extraordinary tale the
Hoppers tell of the three unheralded
Americans responsible for bringing
America’s management techniques to
Postwar Japan. It was a story they
learned much about from Peter Drucker.
Years later, in
1981, Drucker sent
Kenneth Hopper this
letter encouraging
him to finish the
book: “I am
tremendously
interested in what
you write and
impressed by it.”
“You are quite
right,” Drucker
continued, that ”we
know that the
Americans provided
the seed for Japan’s
‘industrial miracle’
but the Japanese
provided the fertile
soil.”
Practical as ever, Drucker made
sure to add: “I look forward to your book
on the subject—don’t forget to tell your
publisher to send me an order form.”
particular communities’ needs, the
Societies based outside the U.S.
sought the freedom to use Drucker’s
teachings in ways that matched local
concerns and perspectives.
“A program we developed to
teach Peter’s management lessons
to high school students in L.A. or
New York might not make sense for
young people in Tokyo,” explained
Lawrence Greenspun, who manages
the Institute’s Drucker Society
programming. “We needed to give
overseas Societies the opportunity to
develop their own methods for
community engagement.”
To meet this goal, the Institute
has formed a Society-led Leadership
Council, chaired initially by India’s
Deepjee Singhal, that will allow
members to share the programs they
develop across the Global Network.
Meanwhile, the U.S.-based
Societies will continue delivering a
half-dozen programs developed by
the Institute—and measuring their
impact and results.
Society Spotlight, cont’d
Letter from Claremont, cont’d
The newsletter of the Drucker Institute www.druckerinstitute.com Nov-Dec 2010
FROM THE ARCHIVES
