Living in More Than One World

Today’s post has two aims: to point towards my two recent guest posts, and to thank the people who provided me the opportunities to write them.  The more recent is An Appreciation of the Life of My Father, Paul Rosenstein (1916-2011), on Santo (Sandy) Costa’s Humanity at Work blog. My dad died at 95 on August 5th, and I think Sandy’s blog is the perfect forum for me to celebrate the life of a man whose work ethic meant that he did not retire until he was 92. Sandy has written a terrific book, also called Humanity at Work, which shows him to be a wonderful example of the Living in More Than One World principle.
In that same category is his colleague Dianne Legro, whom I got to work with during the planning for publication on the blog. She exemplifies emotional intelligence in action.
During the summer, my post Building a Framework to Embrace the New and Expand Your Horizons ran on the SLA Future Ready 365 blog. However, it started life as an entry in 2011 Best Practices for Government Libraries, the excellent publication produced and edited by Marie Kaddell of LexisNexis. Marie was also the person who chose to include it as a group of guest posts for SLA. She has provided me with writing opportunities before, including guest posts on her Government Info Pro blog, and also an entry in 2010 Best Practices for Government Libraries. And she also provided me with the opportunity to do one of my favorite author presentations, giving the keynote for a government librarians event last year at the National Press Club, in Washington, D.C., The New Face of Value: Creating and Sustaining Value in Your Professional and Personal Life.
So I am happy to begin my work week with a big thank you and shout out to the generosity of Sandy Costa, Dianne Legro and Marie Kaddell!

I’m always on the alert to learn about people who live multidimensional lives. By all accounts, Dr. Robert Buckman fit that description perfectly. He was, among other things, an oncologist, professor, writer, broadcaster and humorist. Unfortunately, he died in his sleep on October 9 at 63, on an airplane returning from England (his country of birth) to Canada, where he lived for the last 25 years of his life. Since 1979, he coped with life-threatening illnesses and still managed a whirlwind schedule. From everything I’ve seen, he touched a lot of lives in person, in print, on television and through videos made with John Cleese, of Monty Python fame.
I had never heard of Robert Buckman before two weeks ago, but I’ve found the accounts of his life to be very moving. I had just arrived in Toronto to do a presentation the next day at The University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. I read obits/tributes to him in the Globe and Mail, Toronto Star (for which he was once a columnist) and the National Post.  There have also been pieces in the UK by The Guardian (written by Terry Jones, a Monty Python alumnus with whom Buckman had been working in the UK), The Independent and no doubt others.
When I got back to my hotel the next evening, I began to watch a show about cancer research featuring Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Emperor of All Maladies, on The Agenda with Steve Paikin, on Canada’s TVO network. During the show, I was stunned to see Dr. Buckman appear as a panelist. I figured that it must have been a rerun, but it turns out that he had been a frequent guest, and had taped this appearance right before he flew to the UK. Paikin wrote a nice tribute, Remembering Rob Buckman, on the TVO website. Buckman seems like he would have been a great person to know. And had I not been in Toronto for those two days, I may never have heard of him at all.

On October 13 I was privileged to give a presentation for the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management Getting it Done Expert Speakers Series. My topic, “How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Transform Your Life,” was based on my book, and fit in well with Professor Brendan Calder’s course for second year MBA students, GettingItDone®, which prominently features Drucker’s work. Brendan invited me to speak not just to the class, but to alumni and other members of the Toronto business and nonprofit communities. The great venue (the Fleck Atrium), the size of the audience and the sophisticated engagement demonstrated by their questions made this an event I’ll never forget.

Then something truly extraordinary happened. Brendan had been invited to a special dinner, across the street, at the iSchool of the University of Toronto, honoring the first McLuhan Centenary Visiting Fellows. This is the 100^th anniversary of Marshall McLuhan’s birth, and the school has created a fellowship program for a select group of scholars to spend between three and twelve months in residence in the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the Faculty of Information. I was able to attend as Brendan’s guest; and it was an honor to spend a few hours at the center of the McLuhan world.

McLuhan, who gave us the ideas of the “the medium is the message” and the “global village,” became famous in the 1960s, when he was teaching at the University of Toronto, but he was a friend of Drucker’s long before that. Their relationship is described in a chapter (“The Prophets: Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan”) of Drucker’s 1978 memoir, Adventures of a Bystander. McLuhan co-authored a brief tribute to Drucker, “The Man Who Came to Listen,” in 1970′s Peter Drucker: Contributions to Business Enterprise. They were nearly the same age. Drucker, who died at 95 in 2005, had his centenary marked in 2009, with major events held worldwide for a year. There are also a number of events marking McLuhan’s 100^th, including several this week as part of Toronto’s International Festival of Authors. For a closer look at McLuhan’s time at the university, read Alec Scott’s  “Marshall’s Laws” in UofT Magazine.

I’d like to think that Drucker would have been pleased that I could, even if only unofficially, bring together the Drucker and McLuhan worlds in Toronto on October 13. And I can’t even guess what McLuhan would think!

Peter Drucker would have appreciated the tone of the essays that comprise Rick Wartzman’s What Would Drucker Do Now? Wartzman writes in the Drucker spirit: tough-minded yet positive and fair, with a dose of good humor. He has been writing “The Drucker Difference” biweekly column for Bloomberg BusinessWeek since 2007, when he became Executive Director of The Drucker Institute, at the time a new entity. (Drucker died at 95 in November, 2005.) This collection shows how Wartzman plays off on topics in the news; generally in business but also politics, technology and other subjects, and relates their relevance to Drucker’s work.

The broad sweep of the material reflects Drucker’s diversity. The first three chapters are management-focused, but the next four are on Wall Street/Finance, Values/Responsibility, the Public and Social Sectors; and one that I find particularly interesting: Art, Music and Sports. In the latter we learn about his mid-1980s brief engagement as a consultant for baseball’s Cleveland Indians, how his teachings have influenced the Grammy-winning ensemble Southwest Chamber Music, and the relevance to his writing on how to cost products to Radiohead’s 2007 pay-as-you-like experiment for the album In Rainbows. Wartzman is particularly tough on executive compensation (a familiar Drucker theme) and the fate of the automakers. Drucker had intimate knowledge of this sector, stretching back to the 1940s and his book about General Motors, Concept of the Corporation.

As I noted in my post about The Drucker Lectures, Wartzman answered questions for a 2 ½ page Q&A in my book, Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life. That the writing in his new collection is so strong is not surprising, given his background as a longtime journalist for The Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times, and his work as an author. In particular, he consistently does something that not all journalists/columnists can do: write compelling intros and thought-provoking conclusions. Years from now, people who want an overview of how the business world and society in general unfolded in real time from mid-2007 to early 2011 will find a valuable time capsule in What Would Drucker Do Now?