Living in More Than One World

Michael Lewis has long been one of the top-selling and most recognized nonfiction authors of our era, with such culture-defining books as Liar’s Poker, Moneyball and The Big Short. His recently published The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed Our Minds tells the story of the friendship and collaboration decades ago of two Israeli psychologists, the late Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Laureate. (Kahneman, who achieved further fame with his book Thinking, Fast and Slow; writes about his life and work with Tversky in his Nobel biography.)

Lewis is clearly adept at writing about great minds.

Although Peter Drucker wrote a number of books that could justifiably be called classics, perhaps his most beloved is The Effective Executive, newly reissued as a commemorative 50th Anniversary Edition by HarperCollins, his longtime publisher. We are living in a much different world than the one of 1967, but Drucker’s relatively short guide to getting the right things done, and done well, still packs considerable power.

Cover image courtesy HarperCollinsPublishers

There is also significant added value with a seven-and-a-half-page foreword (“Ten Lessons I Learned from Peter Drucker”) by Good to Great author Jim Collins, who also wrote the forewords to The Daily Drucker and Management: Revised Edition; and an afterword by Zachary First, Executive Director of the Drucker Institute, which also published First’s contribution on its website.

A quiet piece of good news from 2016 was the reissue, after more than three decades, of the two novels written by Peter Drucker in the early ‘80s, The Last of All Possible Worlds (1982) and The Temptation to Do Good (1984). The original publisher of both books was HarperCollins (then called Harper & Row), and the new publisher, which has combined the two volumes into one book, is Philadelphia-based Paul Dry Books.

I wrote about both novels, including answers I received from Drucker about them during a 2003 interview conducted at his home in Claremont, California; in my 2009 book Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life, and a blog post from that year, “Peter Drucker: Novelist.”

The new volume has received a nice boost from an insightful and appreciative Wall Street Journal  review by Daniel Johnson, “The Lessons of His Life: It may surprise even his most fervent admirers to learn that Peter Drucker, the world’s best-known business ‘guru,’ was also a novelist.” As noted in the review, Drucker was a longtime columnist for the newspaper, among his many writing activities.

One of my favorite activities of each holiday season is to round up and write about best business books of the year lists.

2016 has been a tumultuous year to say the least, but it’s been a great one for business and leadership books, as demonstrated by these lists:

Bloomberg: Best Books of 2016

CNBC: Richard Branson shares the 5 best leadership books he read in 2016

The Economist: Books of the Year

Fast Company: The 10 Best Business Books of 2016

Financial Times: The best thing I read all year — 2016

Financial Times/FT & McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award
(The winner is The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan, by Sebastian Mallaby):

Forbes: Top Ten Business Books of 2016, by Shep Hyken

The Globe and Mail: Ten books to top your business reading list, by Harvey Schachter

The Huffington Post: 10 of the Best Business Books of 2016

Inc.

One of my highlights of last month was attending “Here Comes Everybody: Boosting Economic Opportunity in the New Administration,” a policy hackathon held at the Washington, D.C. offices of Google, and co-hosted by ALA/American Library Association’s Office for Information Technology Policy (OITP) and the Internet Association.

The event was detailed in the recent ALA post “Partnering with Tech: Event brainstorms how libraries and the internet industry can collaborate to boost economic growth.” I was invited by my friend Alan Inouye, the ALA OITP Director, and met a number of interesting people, especially from Booz Allen Hamilton, several of whom participated in the hackathon.

As this tumultuous month comes to an end, it’s worth noting the significance the month of November held for Peter Drucker. He was born November 19, 1909 and died November 11, 2005.
November is also a major month of Drucker-related/inspired commemorations and activities. On November 3rd, the Peter Drucker Society Korea held its 10th Annual Conference. November 5th was Drucker Day, in Claremont, California; at the Drucker School of Management. November 17-18 marked what has become perhaps the major global management event of the year, the 8th Global Peter Drucker Forum, in Vienna, Austria; produced by the Peter Drucker Society Europe.

The 15th Annual BK Authors Retreat, held Oct 27-30 in Northern California, was a time of reflection and soul-searching; balancing individual with organizational/collective concerns. It prompted thoughts about career and personal aspirations, and where the writing of books and the business of promoting and selling them fits in.

The retreat is produced by an extraordinary group of people: Berrett-Koehler Authors Inc., which is affiliated with Berrett-Koehler Publishers. BK celebrates its 25th anniversary in 2017 and is a company like no other. As stated on its website, “Berrett-Koehler is an independent publisher with the mission of connecting people and ideas to create a world that works for all.”  Several days after the retreat, it announced its new constitution.

Earlier this month, the innovative nonprofit organization Aileron posted part one and part two of an interview with me about how the principles in my book Create Your Future the Peter Drucker Way can benefit business owners and executives, particularly those in small businesses.

Aileron is a testament to the value of maintaining focus. Its niche is to provide coaching to owners of small businesses. As it points out on its website, “Small business is the engine that drives economic growth.” Although it provides many online resources, Aileron has a striking, nature-based campus in Tipp City, Ohio; near Dayton, for onsite programs.

On September 30, The Drucker Institute announced the winner of the 2016 $100,000 Drucker Prize: ImproveCareNow Network. The Institute says that the winning organization has “transformed health and care by enabling patients, families, clinicians and researchers to collaboratively improve knowledge and outcomes related to Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis. It engages these stakeholders in a learning health network that provides real-time quality improvement, research and community-building for children with these conditions.”

The prize, which has been given since 1991, reflects two particular areas of focus within the long career of Peter Drucker: innovation and the strength of nonprofit organizations, and what businesses can learn from them.

Patti Danos has endured a perfect storm of medical setbacks recently. Patti was the independent publicist for both of my books, and in particular a good friend and wise counselor about publishing, media and careers. For instance, she learned about the opening for managing editor of Leader to Leader early in 2011, encouraged me to apply, and I was brought on that April. It would not have happened without her encouragement, and I’m forever grateful.

Patti is also a terrific writer and editor who gently guided me to sharpen and focus my articles and related promotional material. I first came into contact with her when I was with USA TODAY, and when I was looking for an independent publicist in 2009 for Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life, I discovered that she represented a number of other Berrett-Koehler authors.