management blog

Vienna

A full day of debate, analysis, homage and, just occasionally, longueurs here at the inaugural Peter Drucker forum.

Delegates heard about Drucker’s “integrity, humility and generosity” from Rick Warren, the priest chosen by Barack Obama to speak at his inauguration as President. It turns out that Dr Warren’s all-time best-selling book The Purpose Driven Life was heavily inspired by Drucker.

We heard both CK Prahalad and Charles Handy share their perspectives. CK said that, in his opinion, no other person has had the impact on the practice of management that Drucker has. Charles Handy observed that, even when he felt he had provided some new insight into the challenge of management, he would invariably discover that Drucker had already written at some length along similar lines, often dozens of years earlier.

The Economist’s Adrian Wooldridge told a story about sharing a dismal meal with Drucker in a cheap restaurant near his home in Claremont, California, where the mediocrity of the food was happily blocked out by the brilliance of Drucker’s conversation. (Adrian has written a new piece about Drucker here.)

But inevitably the highlight of the day was the gently debunking, elegantly ironic speech given by Drucker’s 98 year old widow, Doris. She explained that her husband had left Austria at the age of 18, in 1927, believing that his future had to lie beyond the borders of the then greatly reduced, former imperial state. She said that a mini-industry of supposed “Peter’s days in Vienna” stories had created and perpetuated a number of myths – these stories (for example, about his parents inviting Viennese luminaries such as Freud or Hofmanstahl or Schumpeter to dinner) were plainly false. She even hinted that perhaps not all of Peter’s data – especially the numbers – were always rock-solid…

But she did confirm what a remarkable partnership the two of them had enjoyed over the course of seven decades. And she backed up Dr Warren’s point about humility. On their visits to Japan, when meeting dignitaries, “Peter was always the last one to stop bowing”.

And she reiterated that, while the boy had been taken from Austria, you could never really take Austria from the boy. The sound of Peter Drucker attempting – inexpertly – to yodel as the couple descended Mount Fuji must have been extraordinary.