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www.DruckerInstitute.com
From the Archives
Stahl-ed Out: When Peter
Drucker’s monograph was
burned and banned by the Nazis
Local Links
Doing Drucker with every
eighth-grader in the South
Bend, Indiana, public schools
“I don’t predict. I just look out the window and see what’s visible but not yet seen.”
– Peter F. Drucker
the window
Nov-Dec 2011
Letter from Claremont
It won’t be long before China surpasses
the U.S. to become the world’s biggest
economy. But what are the chances that
China can also become one of the most
Drucker-like nations on earth?
If our friend Minglo Shao has anything
to say about it, the odds may actually be
pretty good.
Shao is the founder of the Peter F.
Drucker Academy, an educational institution
that trains thousands of managers a year
across China.
In September, the Drucker Academy
put on its sixth annual management forum,
drawing more than 1,500 attendees in three
cities—Beijing, Nanjing and Guangzhou.
Rick was honored to deliver the keynote
address in each location, with a talk that
echoed the forum’s theme: “Undertaking
Responsibility in a Time of Great Change.”
Rick and the other speakers were
candid about the myriad challenges that
China faces, including a fundamental
misunderstanding among many
businesspeople that profit and social
responsibility are somehow at odds.
“Management’s authority . . . can only
be built on a standard that puts the public’s
interest first,” Shao told the forum.
Walking the streets of Beijing or
Nanjing, it’s hard not to be blown away by
the pace of development all around you. But
as Drucker knew so well, that’s the least
important part of the equation.
“A developing country can easily
import technology,” Drucker noted. “It can
easily import capital. But technology and
capital are simply tools. They only become
effective if properly used . . . by competent
and effective management.” The creation of
such a pool of managerial talent, he added,
“is both China’s greatest need and China’s
greatest opportunity.”
Of Mind, Heart and
Backbone: “Can good
character be taught?”
The most popular Dx post in the past 30 days
Rick Wartzman and Zach First
Executive Director and Managing Director
The Drucker Institute is an entity of Claremont Graduate University, located at 1021 North Dartmouth Avenue, Claremont, California 91711.
p. 2 p. 2
Local Links
How people around the world are bettering their
communities by applying Peter Drucker’s ideas
Check out our monthly radio
show, “Drucker on the Dial,”
where timely issues meet
timeless principles. And please
urge your local public radio
South Bend, Indiana—best station to pick it up.
known as the home of Notre
Dame University—has a new
claim to fame: It’s host of the
first school-district-wide
implementation of Drucker for
Future Leaders.
The DFL program
“taught me how to think a
step ahead, to analyze a
problem or situation and
create a plan for the best
outcome,” said Sydney, an eighth-grade
student at the South Bend Community
School Corporation’s LaSalle
Intermediate Academy.
Sydney is one of roughly 1,400 eighth-grade
students in nine schools who will
participate in DFL this academic year.
Through DFL, the students learn core
Drucker management and leadership
principles, such as identifying and working
from their strengths, practicing planned
abandonment and applying Peter
Drucker’s “Five Most Important
Questions” framework.
They use these lessons to design
and carry out a community
service project. The students
then utilize these same methods
to develop self-management
plans to pursue academic,
personal and other
long-term ambitions.
Indiana University’s
Center for Evaluation and Education Policy
is conducting a third-party assessment of
DFL in South Bend. The curriculum will be
refined based on the Center’s analysis of
the program’s results and impact.
“There are so many things the kids
want to do, things that are in their reach,
but they just don’t know how to get them,”
said LaSalle business teacher Brenda
Wishin. “DFL provides the students with a
tool to get what they want.”
Kinadi, a student at South
Bend’s Jefferson Intermediate
Center, displays her DFL
completion certificate
Check out our monthly radio
show, “Drucker on the Dial,”
where timely issues meet
timeless principles. And please
urge your local public radio station to pick it up.
The Drucker Institute's
Rick Wartzman writes a
column for Bloomberg
Businessweek online that
ties Peter Drucker’s work
to today’s headlines.
Read the latest.
From the
Archives
In his autobiography, Adventures of a
Bystander, Peter Drucker recalls a
conversation he had with a close friend,
Berthold Freyberg, in the spring of 1932.
“Suddenly I heard myself saying: ‘One thing
I do know, Berthold. If the Nazis come to
power, I shan’t stay in Germany.’
“I had not, I think, given conscious
thought to the decision at all until then,”
Drucker added. “But the moment I heard
myself say this, I knew that I had made up
my mind.”
The Nazis would soon make up their
minds about Drucker, as well.
After that conversation with Freyberg,
Drucker began writing a monograph on
Friedrich Julius Stahl, a Conservative
political philosopher who also happened to
be Jewish. Drucker knew that “a
monograph on Stahl, which in the name of
conservatism and patriotism put him forth
as the exemplar and preceptor for the
turbulence of the 1930s, represented a
frontal attack on Nazism.”
He was certainly correct about that:
When the monograph was published in
1933, the Nazis found it so offensive that it
was banned and burned.
Drucker saw early on the toxic nature
of Nazism. In the pamphlet he wrote: “The
Conservative theory of the state also knows
that political freedom is only of value, when
it is anchored in a higher communal
obligation; otherwise the result is self-destruction
and anarchy and an inevitable
slide to despotism and dictatorship.”
Peter Drucker’s 1933 pamphlet on
Friedrich Julius Stahl was banned and
burned by the Nazis.
The Drucker Institute is an affiliate of the Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management.
