Living in More Than One World

Last week I wrote the first of several installments about the new book Drucker: A Life in Pictures, by Rick Wartzman, Executive Director of the Drucker Institute; with photos by Anne Fishbein (whose work has been displayed in many major museums and galleries), and curated by Drucker Institute archivist Bridget Lawlor. The content reveals a lot about Peter Drucker’s work processes, the thought that underpinned his work, and how varied that work was. In the previous post I mentioned the notes from leaders in business, politics and even baseball. But his involvement and influence extended beyond these worlds. One of the most eye-opening pages contains a short letter to Drucker from the legendary labor leader Cesar Chavez, from February 8, 1982, looking forward to their next meeting ten days later. (Would this be the type of formality taken care of in an email these days?)

Drucker’s social sector work has been well-documented, and is reinforced by the visuals here. He consulted in the 1980s during the tenure of Frances Hesselbein as CEO of the Girl Scouts of the USA, and pages 98-99 display photos of Drucker’s Girl Scouts sash and lifetime membership. After retiring as CEO, Hesselbein, Bob Buford and Richard F. Schubert started the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management, in 1990. (It’s now called the Frances Hesselbein Leadership Institute, and with Jossey-Bass, co-publishes the quarterly journal Leader to Leader, where I have been managing editor since 2011.) Buford, the chairman emeritus of the Drucker Institute, was a longtime friend, colleague and consulting partner of Drucker’s. He’s represented by an 8-point document from 2002, “What Peter Drucker Does For Me.” Buford was instrumental in introducing Drucker to people who eventually led the megachurch phenomenon, which I first learned about through Drucker’s writings in the 1990s. One of its major figures, Saddleback Church Pastor Rick Warren, also had a longstanding relationship with Drucker. On the page opposite Buford’s is a picture of a specially-personalized copy of Warren’s huge-selling book The Purpose Driven Life.

I’ll continue my exploration into Drucker: A Life in Pictures next week. Until then, it’s worth reflecting on not just how Peter Drucker led a life of such significance and influence in so many spheres, but how we can as well.

The life story of Peter Drucker has been told in a number of ways, by a number of people, including Drucker himself. But telling it in photographs is a different twist, thanks to the fascinating, beautifully designed new book Drucker: A Life in Pictures. It is the work of the Drucker Institute, in Claremont, Cal., with an introduction and running commentary by Executive Director Rick Wartzman; and curation of images by archivist Bridget Lawlor. The images of items from the Institute’s Drucker Archives were photographed by a renowned Los Angeles-based photographer, Anne Fishbein. There is so much packed within these pages (and in the Archives itself), that I plan to devote several different blog posts to its contents.

The chapters are arranged by various areas of Drucker’s life, beginning with “The Immigrant,” “The Writer,” “The Teacher,” and so on. The photos are of artifacts (such as his U.S. citizenship card and portions of his FBI file), objects (albums from his record collection, his Brother GX-6750 typewriter) and documents, including letters to and from him and handwritten notes to him. Each chapter begins with a brief interview excerpt. I am honored that an excerpt from my April 11, 2005 interview with him leads off the chapter “Family Man, Friend and Fan.” The names of some of the people who wrote to Drucker provide a sense of how far his reach extended. A short list includes General Electric’s Jack Welch, Herman Miller’s Max De Pree; politicians Daniel P. Moynihan and Newt Gingrich; and, in the baseball world, Peter Bavasi, president of the Cleveland Indians, whom Drucker advised in 1986. Separately, there is a full page photo of him in a Kansas City Royals jacket and cap.

In my next post I’ll get into more of the specifics of some of the letters and notes. In the meantime, the textual and visual contents of this book reinforce the fact that Peter Drucker was a one-of-a-kind person; even the greatest of the novelists he so admired could not have invented his life story.

A major highlight of my just-completed course, The Special Library/Information Center, at the Catholic University of America School of Library and Information Science, was The 17th Special Libraries Symposium, held on August 25th.
Eleven panelists donated their time to meet with my students: Joanne Berger- FDA Biosciences Library; Linda Broussard- SLA/Special Libraries Association; Cameron Gowan- Jones Day; James King- The National Institutes of Health; Rick Kowalski- Consumer Electronics Association; Thomas Mann- Library of Congress; Jennifer McMahan- U.S. Department of Justice; Susan O’Brian- The American Prospect; Angela Titone- Consumer Electronics Association; Joan Weeks- Library of Congress/CUA SLIS and Amanda Wilson- U.S. Department of Transportation. Our special guest on the panel was Derek Attig, a doctoral student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who was this summer’s 2012 Google Policy Fellow at the American Library Association’s Washington, D.C. office.
Among the key takeaways on to how to begin and progress through a career journey in special libraries and related fields:
1. Get involved in SLA or a related professional association, where you can develop leadership skills, take on unfamiliar responsibilities, build friendships and your personal network, and stretch professionally.
2. Learn about contracts and how they are negotiated. Sit in on contract negotiations, and if necessary, learn about these areas away from the library.
3. Sign up for free webinars, including ones in different fields, to learn content and discover how they are produced.
4. Investigate the potential of becoming an electronic resource librarian, and become familiar with how mobile apps can serve organizations.
5. You may have to create your own job, or look for jobs not in libraries, but that call on library-like skills. Don’t limit yourself.
6. Keep developing your writing and presentation skills.
I’m grateful that the panelists made the time on a hot summer evening to help prepare a new generation of information professionals for success in this brave new world.

Many notable people will be delivering commencement addresses on campuses across the country this month. But it is worth looking back to May 31, 1964, when Peter Drucker delivered the commencement addresses at the University of Scranton, in Scranton, Pa.  I was born and raised there, and in 2010 I wrote about my return to the city in May of that year, to give a presentation about my book based on Drucker’s work.
The June 1, 1964 edition of The Scranton Times published a transcript of Drucker’s talk, though it is not online. (However, the Drucker Archives has an online photo of his honorary doctorate degree.) While congratulating the all-male graduates – the school began admitting women in 1972 – he reminded them of the responsibility to put their knowledge to work for the benefit of as many people as possible. He said their years of education represented sacrifices from parents and money from taxpayers; and that it wasn’t long before when most people left school at 14 to go to work.  Hopes for a society “free from prejudice” and other injustices depended on these and similar graduates;  “the first generation of the “knowledge revolution” who will have to prove whether we have invested our faith, our resources and our hopes wisely or foolishly.”
Familiar themes from his books of that period were sounded; the change from producing things to knowledge work; the relatively new demand for educated people and how teaching hadn’t changed much in hundreds of years. “But what education and knowledge mean to society, that has changed drastically, and within the lifetime of the older generation still living.”
Drucker said that power and influence should not be used for selfish ends. They and others like them around the country faced “a very much brighter future than young people have ever faced before.” That, however, also brought a considerable challenge: “I hope you will remember that in turn it is your responsibility to put our knowledge and your education to work where they produce the most – for you, for your families, for your society, for your country and for mankind.”

What did Peter Drucker have in common with Bob Dylan and The Beatles? More than you might initially think. All were/are at the top of their fields; all were/are prolific, serious innovators. They also changed their initial styles of expression from their early to more mature work.
Beyond that, there are interesting geographic angles. Drucker, who was born in Vienna, Austria in 1909, began working as a clerk apprentice, and studying law at Hamburg University, in Germany, in 1927. This was a formative time for him, which included being introduced to great works of literature by a local librarian, and also attending the opera on a student ticket to hear what became a life-changing work, Verdi’s Falstaff.  Thirty- three years later, in 1960, The Beatles left Liverpool and did their own apprenticeship in Hamburg; playing grueling hours in the city’s gritty clubs. Their experiences formed the basis for the polished, groundbreaking band they would later become.
Drucker moved to the United States in 1937, and in 1950 began teaching at the Graduate Business School of New York University (now New York University Stern School of Business), an association that would last for two decades. While he was teaching at NYU, Bob Dylan moved from Minnesota to New York City’s Greenwich Village, in 1961. It’s fascinating to think that while Dylan was doing his world-changing work in the 1960s, Drucker was in the same city all along, teaching, consulting and writing some of his most important books, such as The Effective Executive and The Age of Discontinuity. While it’s tempting to think that Dylan and Drucker could have bumped into each other on the streets of the village near the NYU buildings, my understanding is that Drucker’s classes were actually held in the Wall Street area, so it is unlikely their paths crossed. (If anyone knows differently, I’d love to hear about it!)
People will still be reading Drucker’s books, and listening to the music of Dylan and The Beatles far into the future. And none of it would have happened without those early days of apprenticeship and inspiration.

I’ve been fascinated by the National Football League and National Basketball Association player drafts for a long time. A fun part of my job during 21 years (1987-2008) as a reference librarian at USA TODAY was researching articles for the Sports section, including those on the drafts. This year’s NFL draft was held last week, and the media coverage was the most intense ever, especially from national outlets like USA TODAY and ESPN, which broadcast the draft live, in prime time.
As expected, the first two picks were quarterbacks: Stanford’s Andrew Luck, chosen by the Indianapolis Colts, followed by Baylor’s Robert Griffin III, to the Washington Redskins. But the draft, even with intense scouting, interviewing and statistical research, is not an exact science. Success at quarterback is particularly difficult to predict, as shown in a 2008 article in The New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell, Most Likely to Succeed: How do we hire when we can’t tell who’s right for the job? Lots of high-round draft choices fizzle, while low-round choices end up becoming superstars. The most famous of those cases in recent years has been New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, who wasn’t chosen until the 6th round of the 2000 draft. For an enlightening look at low-round picks who made it big, check out the NFL.com photo essay Best late-round NFL draft steals since merger.
Brady and the other draft “steals” illuminate something important that reflects much of the interest in this big-money business exercise. Teams, players and fans are given a sense of hope – if only for a short time – that the future will be better than the past. Or in the case of the top-of-the-standings teams, that their success can be sustained in the future. That sense of hope will be transferred to the basketball world soon. It’s less than two months to June 28th, the date of the NBA draft. More futures (individually and team-wide) are about to be created, for better or worse.

Tom Butler-Bowdon, author of the 50 Classics series, has a new book, Never Too Late to be Great: The Power of Thinking Long, that should provide considerable inspiration to many people who need it the most. Among those who should find it especially interesting and helpful are late bloomers, career changers, people in transition and even procrastinators. The premise is that significant success, even and especially in middle age and beyond, is possible if you think strategically in long enough time frames, while working hard and doing what is necessary to make it happen (e.g. additional learning, networking, and gaining experience in a field any way possible). And try not to be too impatient.
He is a master synthesizer of information who tells a story succinctly and effectively. A key message is that success is rarely preordained. Although the stories of Howard Schultz of Starbucks and Ray Kroc of McDonald’s have been told often, they still seem fresh here, especially when told from this vantage point. Hard work, diligence, a fierce entrepreneurial spirit, ingenuity and vision for the future propelled people like Schultz and Kroc to success, not anything in their background. And I found particularly interesting the roots of Amnesty International and its founder Peter Benenson; and the Lonely Planet publishing empire, founded by Tony and Maureen Wheeler. Ditto the long climbs of such literary figures as the novelists Lionel Shriver and Vikram Seth.
Butler-Bowdon wrote the book when he was 43, and many of the examples are of people who did not find their greatest successes until they were 40 or older, some much older. He explains some of the main ideas from the book in a recent Huffington Post, Life Isn’t Short: What it Means For Your Success. I interviewed him in 2010 for my blog, and in 2008 I wrote about and interviewed him for USA TODAY. While his message is important for middle age people, I think that younger readers will also find inspiration in these examples. When you have potentially many years stretching ahead of you, thinking long from the start can give you a tremendous advantage, and even peace of mind.

Leave it to The Economist, and specifically the Schumpeter management column, to find the intersection between Leonard Cohen and entrepreneurship. The February 25th Enterprising Oldies explores, in a neat package, why all of us (no matter where we are chronologically in adulthood) may have to explore entrepreneurship and other forms of self-employment at some point in our working lives.
As we think about how to diversify our portfolio of work experiences, it’s worth digging deeper into how we can apply some of the life lessons of the 77 year old Cohen, a singer/songwriter/poet/novelist who was inducted into the Rock&Roll Hall of Fame in 2008. He’s written such oft-recorded classics as “Suzanne” and “Bird on a Wire,” and the more recent “Hallelujah.”
As pointed out in The Economist and a recent New York Times interview, part of Cohen’s recent renaissance has come about because he had to resume touring and recording to help make up for millions of dollars lost in dealings with a former financial adviser. But no matter what the impetus was, the fact is that he has a new album, Old Ideas, and has toured the world recently at far beyond traditional retirement age. What can we learn from his example?
1.    Diversified creative output. He has a tremendous body of work, going back more than 40 years, to draw on. It’s entirely possible that his poetry books are not major money-spinners, but he also has his albums, songwriting royalties (perhaps a considerable sum, given all the cover versions of his songs) and concert fees.
2.    A  powerful personal brand. Mention the name and people instantly associate it with him and his work.
3.    A global outlook. He has a worldwide following, with his books and music available worldwide, and fans everywhere, well beyond his native Canada.
4.    Remaining relevant. People are eager to listen to the new output of this 77 year old man, and he’s adding new fans all the time.
5.    An impressive body of work. One reason millions of dollars are at stake from Cohen’s career is that he has written and recorded so many important songs over more than 40 years.
Even if the work you do is not creative in nature, chances are you still may have to/want to work beyond 65. It’s never too soon, or too late to be thinking about amassing a high-quality body of work, diversifying your output, building your brand, thinking globally and remaining relevant.
As ties to traditional jobs and employment arrangements continue to evolve and become more tenuous, we will increasingly find ourselves in what could be called The Leonard Cohen Economy.

On January 26th I had the honor of speaking at a Drucker Business Forum event in Pasadena, California: Living in More Than One World: Bruce Rosenstein in Conversation With Shannon Barnes. Shannon, a senior advisor for the EDGE group, was a great conversation partner/moderator, and his multidimensional life story was a perfect complement to the idea of living in more than one world.
The forums (free, but registration required) are produced by the Drucker School. They are a valuable combination of education and networking, especially during the continental breakfast before the program. The forums are for Drucker alumni, and other members of the Los Angeles-area business and professional community.
Some are held in Los Angeles, but others, including this one, are in Pasadena, co-presented by the flagship Southern California Public Radio (SCPR) station, 89.3 KPCC, at an impressive venue that is part of their building complex, The Crawford Family Forum. The latter’s website describes it as a “welcoming, non-partisan, knowledge-building space where Southern Californians of all backgrounds can engage in the face-to-face exchange of knowledge and ideas that is becoming increasingly rare in the digital era.”
The idea of living in more than one world, developing and nurturing multiple and diverse areas of your life (inside and outside the workplace), resonated with the audience. It was apparent from their questions during the Q&A, and in discussions afterwards at the book signing. Some had been even been students of Peter Drucker.
Participating was especially gratifying, given some of the high-profile previous speakers, such as Howard Schultz, Gretchen Morgenson and Nobel economics laureate Michael Spence. Future speakers include Rick Wartzman, the executive director of the Drucker Institute, on February 23.
After the event ended, I told Mark Crowley, KPCC’s vice president and general manager (and a Drucker School alum) about my background in college radio and with the Voice of America, and asked him for a tour, which was fascinating. Check out the station’s website for digital offerings, or to listen live. And if you live in Southern California, make it a point to attend a Drucker Business Forum this year. You never know where it may lead.

One of the best examples of a multidimensional person living in more than one world is Chuck Leavell. He is probably best known as a top-level pianist who has played with The Rolling Stones for nearly 30 years and was with the Allman Brothers Band before that. He has also led his own band, Sea Level, and his discography is jaw-dropping. But as his recent bylined piece, A Rock ‘n’ Roll Tour de Forest, in The Wall Street Journal shows, he also operates on many other important levels: operator (with his wife, Rose Lane) of a tree farm in Georgia, conservationist, environmental/sustainable development advocate, author and tech entrepreneur.
His recent TedXAtlanta video about balance in life and balance in development demonstrates the personal characteristics that have made him a success: he comes across as passionate, articulate, genial and informed. Although I never met him during my music world days, I’ve known about him since the beginning of his music career in the early 1970s. I’m sure he meets and interacts with a fascinating diversity of people in each of his roles, and that his involvement in so many worlds feeds an intense intellectual curiosity.
It’s encouraging that he has attracted so much attention. His most recent book, Growing a Better America, was published earlier this year. In recent weeks, besides the WSJ piece, there has been a New York Times college football-themed blog post interview with him, Postcard From Alabama: Playing for the Stones, Rooting for the Tide; and Chuck Leavell On Piano Jazz, a recent piece on NPR.org that includes his enjoyable and informative 2003 interview/music appearance on Marian McPartland’s Piano Jazz. We should all be grateful that Leavell is truly living in more than one world.