Living in More Than One World

Last week, I wrote for the second time on 50 Philosophy Classics, the new book by Tom Butler-Bowdon. One of Tom’s featured books is 1843’s Fear and Trembling, by the Danish philosopher-theologian Søren Kierkegaard. The 200th anniversary of Kierkegaard’s birth was celebrated on May 5th, and there will be activities throughout the year in his native Copenhagen and elsewhere.

Much of my interest in Kierkegaard stems from Peter Drucker’s deeply personal 1949 Sewanee Review essay, “The Unfashionable Kierkegaard,” which was anthologized in his 1993 book The Ecological Vision. In the essay, Drucker describes Fear and Trembling as “my favorite among Kierkegaard’s books.” As I wrote in 2011, Joseph A. Maciariello and Karen E. Linkletter examined this essay eloquently in their book Drucker’s Lost Art of Management.

You can also find a commentary on the essay by Richard Brem on the Drucker Society of Austria website, followed by the text itself. A highly interesting typewritten manuscript on the Drucker Archives website contains the text of a lecture, “Søren Kierkegaard: Or, How is Human Existence Possible?” It was given by Drucker 70 years ago yesterday, on May 20, 1943, at Bennington College, where he was teaching at the time.

Most people will not travel to Copenhagen to celebrate, but there is considerable reading online, including Judith Thurman’s post on newyorker.com; a post on Free Exchange, the economics blog of The Economist, and an op/ed in The New York Times, “Kierkegaard at 200,” by Gordon Marino, professor of philosophy and director of the Howard and Edna Hong Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College, in Minnesota. For the time being, Oxford Journals is providing free access to selected Kierkegaard-themed articles.

Perhaps reading this material will provide the spark to attend one of the upcoming events, or to visit Copenhagen to see where Kierkegaard lived his relatively short, but influential life.

In my previous installment of posts about the new book Drucker: A Life in Pictures, I remarked on the tremendous variety of people who are represented in documents depicted from the Drucker Archives, including Cesar Chavez, Rick Warren and Frances Hesselbein. As the chapter “The Social-Sector Advisor” makes clear, Peter Drucker was a citizen of the highest order. Besides some of the organizations mentioned in my earlier posts, this also illustrates his involvement with CARE International (CARE Foundation International Humanitarian Award; May 24, 1995), the Salvation Army (Evangeline Booth Award, 2001) and Mutual of America (Distinguished Citizens Service Award; April 4, 1991).

I was particularly struck by the photo of the typewritten document “Peter F. Drucker (Partial) List of Community Service Responsibilities 1950-1988.” He separates the list into two categories: (1) Doing, (2) Advisor and Consultant. The first includes (all as Drucker typed it): Trustee-some time Vice-Chairman, Montclair State College, Montclair, NJ, 1960-71;[Drucker lived in Montclair when he taught at New York University]; Board of Directors, American Management Association, 1952-1960; 1972-1976; Commissioner, Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, 1986; Member, Asian Art Council, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1986; Member, Advisory Council, Peace Corps, 1968-1973; President, Society for the History of  Technology.

In category two (again, not repeating organizations from my earlier posts, and as he typed it), the list includes the American Heart Association, University of Pennsylvania, Stanford Graduate Business School, Navajo Indian Tribal Council, International Rescue Committee, Japan House NYC, American Symphony Orchestra League and the Western Association of Hospitals. Those are only some of the organizations on both lists. And all of these responsibilities were on top of his other consulting work, as well as his teaching and writing. Peter Drucker as role model is on full display in this chapter, and in the entire book.

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.

It’s been three weeks since I’ve been in Claremont, California; where I spent several days at the Drucker School and elsewhere at Claremont Graduate University and The Claremont Colleges. Now the new, Fall 2012 issue of The Flame, CGU’s excellent quarterly magazine, is available in print and online. I’ve been reading this regularly since my first visit to Claremont in 2002, when I began researching my book Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life.
The article  “A Hunger for Change” profiles Badiul Alam Majumdar, Vice President and Country Director, The Hunger Project-Bangladesh. More than 20 years ago, he gave up a tenured teaching position at Washington State University to return to Bangladesh, the country of his birth, to make a different type of difference in the world. He was one of Drucker’s earliest students at Claremont in the early 1970s.
What is the relationship of football and other sports to positive psychology and flow? That is what retired NFL player Damian Vaughn is trying to determine, as related in the article “Football, Flow, and Finding Your Way After Tearing an Achilles Tendon.” Vaughn now consults with athletes and business people on finding flow and peak performance, and is studying at CGU’s School of Behavioral and Organizational Sciences (SBOS). He’s also working on two pilot studies at CGU’s Quality of Life Research Center with the founder of flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, whom I wrote about for USA TODAY in 2003.
There is also an enlightening Q&A, “The Mormon Moment, In Context” (three pages in the magazine, but extended online) with Patrick Q. Mason, the Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies and Associate Professor of North American Religion at CGU’s School of Religion (SOR). Besides providing additional context on Mormonism and Mitt Romney, Mason also discusses his own life as a scholar and author, including the important role The Autobiography of Malcolm X has played in that life. “One of the reasons I like Malcolm,” Mason says, “personally and spiritually, is because he was a spiritual pilgrim. His life is a remarkable one of assimilating truth and searching for truth.”

Last week I wrote about my experiences in Claremont, California at Drucker Day, on November 10th. However, I also had the pleasure of spending November 8th and 9th, and part of November 7th, on the campuses of The Claremont Colleges and The Claremont Graduate University. In between meetings with friends at the Drucker School and the Drucker Institute, I also managed to take advantage of a few on-campus activities.
After arriving in town mid-day Wednesday, I attended a fascinating talk by John Bachmann, senior partner (and retired managing partner) of Edward Jones, and chairman of the Board of Visitors of the Drucker School and trustee of Claremont Graduate University. He was interviewed by Rick Wartzman, the Executive Director of the Drucker Institute, on “How I Became a CEO.” Bachmann is also a Distinguished Visiting Assistant Professor at the Drucker School, and was a longtime friend and consulting partner of Peter Drucker. He is a perfect example of the many high-profile, highly accomplished leaders who were followers of Drucker.
A trait that Bachmann shares with Drucker, and so many of Drucker’s followers, is intense intellectual and cultural curiosity. This played out for Drucker in his interest in and collecting of Japanese art. During the Drucker Centennial in 2009, I attended the opening of an exhibit, “Zen! Japanese Paintings From the Sanso Collection,” of this collection on campus, at the Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery, at Scripps College. I returned there during this visit for another Japanese-themed exhibit, “Genji’s World in Japanese Woodblock Prints.” Maybe it was because it was late Friday, but I had the gallery all to myself.
I always enjoy going to the Honnold/Mudd library on campus, including the Honnold/Mudd Café. On Thursday I attended the library’s Claremont Discourse Lecture, “How American Bandstand Created the American Teenager,” by Scripps College professor Matt Delmont. It was based on his new book The Nicest Kids in Town: American Bandstand, Rock ‘n’ Roll, and Civil Rights in 1950s Philadelphia. As a pre-teen during that decade in Scranton, Pa., I religiously watched the show when it was a weekday, after-school offering. Matt’s lecture was highly interesting and intriguing, the same qualities I’m finding so far in the book. It provides new perspectives on Bandstand’s host, the late Dick Clark; and on rock music’s central role in the growing power of teenagers in the early baby-boom years. And gaining new perspectives is a perfect reason to spend a few days on a college campus.

How can sustainability become a profitable source of innovation? And how can we go beyond economic and environmental sustainability to achieve social sustainability through individually flourishing lives? Those were some of the main themes of Drucker Day 2012, an all-day gathering I attended on November 10th at the Drucker-Ito School at the Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, Calif. The event (which I also wrote about last year) serves many purposes: as a tribute to Peter Drucker, a coming together of alumni, faculty, staff and friends of the school for fellowship, food and networking; and to examine challenging topics of importance in business and society. This year included a panel presentation on sustainability in Costa Rica, with Gabriela Llobet, general director of Cinde; Roberto Mata, CEO of the carbon-neutral coffee cooperative Coopedota; and Carmen Irene Alas, who is based in El Salvador, as the Chief Editor of the magazine Estrategia y Negocios.
Jeremy Hunter, an assistant professor at the Drucker School whom I wrote about in the recent post Mindfulness at Work (and Beyond), was featured in two sessions. The first, Re-envisioning Sustainable Business: From Cost Advantage to Flourishing; was in the morning for the entire group, presented with Chris Laszlo, a visiting professor at Drucker who is based at the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University, in Cleveland. (I also enjoyed Laszlo’s afternoon breakout session The Sustainability Frontier: Embedding Sustainability into Strategy for Competitive Advantage, with Drucker School professor Vijay Sathe, who also moderated the Costa Rica panel.)
Jeremy led a participatory afternoon breakout session, Cultivating Your Resources: Building Resilience from the Inside Out. The idea was that living in today’s hyper-connected, perpetually busy world has given many of us stress levels that are too high, producing unsustainable lifestyles that are potentially harmful to social sustainability. He led our group in a brief meditation, while we remained in our seats in the classroom. It was structured around ways to discover internal resources (such as positive experiences, favorite places or pieces of music) and external ones, such as “values, beliefs and experience that sustain and nourish you.” The act of briefly thinking deeply about, and paying attention to one of these resources produced positive changes in both body and mind for many of us. Of course, most of us won’t have Jeremy to personally guide our future meditations. As with sustainability, it is up to us to put it into practice.

William A. Cohen, one of the most astute writers on the work of Peter Drucker, has released his third Drucker-related book in the past five years: Drucker on Marketing: Lessons from the World’s Most Influential Business Thinker. He was Drucker’s first executive PhD student, in the 1970s, at what is now the Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito School of Management at Claremont Graduate University, in California. Now he has combined his own background in marketing with his extensive knowledge of and insight into Drucker’s work. The terrific foreword to the book is by Philip Kotler, the S.C. Johnson & Son Professor of International Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, often called the “father of modern marketing.”  Kotler reveals that upon first meeting Drucker, they discovered a mutual, serious interest in Japanese art.
I’ve known Bill Cohen since 2007, a year before the publication of his first Drucker-focused book, A Class with Drucker: The Lost Lessons of the World’s Greatest Management Teacher, and two years before my book Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life. Both of us participated in the Drucker Authors Festival at the Drucker-Ito School in 2010. Bill exemplifies a fascinating aspect of so many Drucker followers: they are high-achieving, very well-rounded people. Among other things, he is a retired Air Force major general, and a highly prolific author with an extensive background in both business and academia. He is now president of the California Institute of Advanced Management.
In Drucker on Marketing, Cohen collects, analyzes and synthesizes Drucker’s most important thoughts on the subject, and shows how they have applied to specific business cases and can be applied in your own business, now and in the future. His style is direct and conversational, and the analysis is enlivened with examples such as FedEx’s failure with its Zap Mail service of 1984, and how the entrepreneur Peter Hodgson discovered and bought the rights to an obscure General Electric product that eventually became known to millions as Silly Putty. Despite the importance Drucker placed on marketing, he never devoted an entire book to it. I think he’d be pleased with Drucker on Marketing.

I enjoyed yesterday’s report by Lisa Napoli for NPR Morning Edition, Buddhist Meditation: A Management Skill? It features my friend Jeremy Hunter, a professor at the Drucker-Ito School in Claremont, Cal. He was one of the first people I met when I went to Claremont in 2002 to do research for my book, Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life. Jeremy teaches mindfulness (including meditation) and self-management, geared to the needs and expectations of MBA students. I sat in on one of his classes in 2005. In 2010, he and Scott Scherer contributed a chapter, Knowledge Worker Productivity and the Practice of Self-Management, to the book The Drucker Difference.

Applying the principles of mindfulness to work, which I wrote about in early 2011, remains a hot topic. The MBA-oriented site Poets & Quants recently ran a three-part series by Deborah Knox, Train Your Mind, Improve Your Game: Meditation for the 21st-Century Leader. Workplace.com had a September 6 feature about mindfulness training and multitasking. The August 21 Chicago Tribune piece Be Mindful for a Better Workplace quotes Mirabai Bush, co-founder and Associate Director of the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, who is interviewed in an extensive feature in transform, Mirabai Bush: The Work of Compassionate Action.
Bill George, the former CEO of Medtronic turned best-selling author and Harvard Business School professor, has given a considerable boost of credibility to mindfulness and meditation for the benefit of work. In particular, see his 2010 post about a two-day mindful leadership retreat. Having returned from Japan not long ago, I was interested to see Overcoming stress / Psychological, physical methods for mindfulness in The Daily Yomiuri Online on September 9. The British site Personneltoday.com ran Mindfulness: helping employees to deal with stress, on September 3.
There are also a lot of good mindfulness resources for work and beyond at mindful.org. In fact, there are so many good print and online resources about mindfulness that it is difficult to be sufficiently mindful when writing a blog post about mindfulness!

A number of books and articles that I collected over a period of years became important background material for the Peter Drucker-related visit I made to Japan, as I wrote in the previous of (now six) posts about my week in Tokyo.
As helpful as all of that reading material was, I also read a lot of Drucker’s work about Japan, in books and articles, before and especially during my time there. One was Drucker on Asia: A Dialogue Between Peter Drucker and Isao Nakauchi, which I read in the English translation published in 1997. But within that book it notes that the original was published in Japanese in 1995, titled Chosen no toki, as two volumes, by Diamond, Inc., Drucker’s publisher in Japan (and I’m happy to say, mine as well).
The Ecological Vision: Reflections on the American Condition; a 466 page collection of essays with new Drucker introductions, originally published in 1993, was also really valuable. Part Seven is called “Japan as Society and Civilization,” and contains five chapters plus the introduction.
It contains some of his most personal and wide-ranging writing on many aspects of Japanese life, including a 17 page essay, “A View of Japan Through Japanese Art,” which originally appeared in the catalog for a 1979 art exhibit. I particularly enjoyed a Wall Street Journal piece from 1980: “How Westernized Are the Japanese?” It includes a wonderful section about a “twenty-year-old daughter of old friends – we have known her since she was a toddler,” who indignantly tells him that in her philosophy seminar about Plato, the readings were not translated into Japanese. They were in the original Greek. She was also reading Kant and Schopenhauer, in German; along with “Whitehead, Russell, Wittgenstein and Symbolic Logic, in English, of course.” What, Drucker asks her, are you doing for fun? Her reply: “This is fun.” The young student would be 52 now. One wonders what became of her, and the other people in this short, enlightening article in a big, helpful book.