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!

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?

It’s been a whirlwind summer. Shortly after my presentation at the SLA Annual Conference in Philadelphia came an intensive, six-week teaching semester for the course The Special Library/Information Center, at the Catholic University School of Library and Information Science. The students completed two major papers: a site visit at a Washington, D.C.-area special library, as well as a Virtual SLA project, in which they followed online, after the fact, and reported on the SLA Annual Conference. In one part of the paper, each student had to interview two librarians who had been at the conference, but whom they did not know previously. A major highlight of the course was the 16th Special Libraries Symposium, where a panel of local librarians met with the class and special guests to discuss their career journeys and the state-of-the-art in the profession.

While teaching I was also working on my first complete issue (the forthcoming Winter 2012, which will be out in mid-December) as Managing Editor of Leader to Leader. I’m learning a lot every day and interacting with a whole new set of people within and related to the leadership world. There are many deadlines involved, but I have always prided myself on making them in a timely fashion. In this I agree with Drucker, who once told me that “deadlines are sacred.”

Sadly, the summer also saw the illness, and eventual death, of my 95 year old father, Paul Rosenstein. His funeral, in Scranton, Pa., where I was born and raised, was a deeply moving experience. I will write more in the future about his great, long life.

Now blog writing beckons again. If anyone else had a similar experience of adapting to new schedules, demands and routines this summer, I’d love to hear about it!

The Drucker Institute (including the extensive online Drucker Archives) has been the go-to point for Drucker material, and now includes a new monthly radio show, “Drucker on the Dial.” The Drucker-Ito School at Claremont Graduate University remains a vital source of Drucker-related knowledge, and Bernard Jaworski was recently appointed as the Peter F. Drucker Chair in Management and the Liberal Arts. There have also been several issues of professional journals devoted to Drucker-related information, including a robust website from Emerald Insight. The current era cries out for the fundamental first principles in which Drucker excelled. I believe Drucker himself would be proud and pleased at the intense interest in him, and might give at least a small smile and nod to the concept of “Drucker as His Own Successor.”

Considerable added value is provided by their explanations of the people and ideas that influenced Drucker, and then synthesizing many of these ideas to demonstrate their importance in Drucker’s work as a writer, teacher and consultant. So we get, for instance, mini-biographies of Drucker influences such as the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Thorstein Veblen (“The Theory of the Leisure Class”) and many others. There is even a 41 page section on Abraham Lincoln as a case study in leadership in relation to Drucker’s principles.

What I find particularly fascinating about the book is the wealth of material about Drucker in regard to faith, spirituality and religion, and how these areas influenced his work and thinking. Drucker’s books are filled with references to these topics, though as the authors point out, he generally did not make his own religious views a prominent part of his writing or teaching. See in particular their examination of Drucker’s highly personal 1949 essay “The Unfashionable Kierkegaard,” and their background material on Kierkegaard. Although I have not met Linkletter, I have known Maciariello since 2002, when he was the first person I interviewed for my book. For more on his work and relationship with Drucker, see this 2009 interview with Alistair Craven.

The solution, Bergstrand believes, is to apply Peter Drucker’s work on innovation to the technology issues that were barely in existence when Drucker was writing, such as social media and cloud computing. “He had brilliant insights about innovation,” Bergstrand writes, “that can help CIOs take the right risks on new technologies and avoid the failures that ultimately sank so many dotcom companies.”

Bergstrand is founder and CEO of the consulting company Brand Velocity. He was a longtime Coca-Cola Company executive, including being its CIO. And he is quite knowledgeable about Drucker, whose ideas on knowledge work and knowledge worker productivity form the backbone of Bergstrand’s book Reinvent Your Enterprise Through Better Knowledge Work. I met Jack last November when we were both panelists for the Drucker Authors Festival on Drucker Centennial Day 2010, in Claremont, Cal. In talking to him and reading his book, I was impressed that he (like Drucker) was able to draw from many different sources to convey information in a serious, yet accessible way. Besides business and technology, Bergstrand also applies such areas as chess, cybernetics, sports and particularly psychology.

Drucker’s major work on innovation is the 1985 book Innovation and Entrepreneurship, a classic that is not as dated as you might think a 26 year old book would be on these topics. The reason is that its principles can still be applied today, which gets back to Bergstrand’s argument. His CIO.com look at innovation and its problems is also applicable beyond the concerns of CIOs. How can we best innovate as people and within organizations, while making sure our daily work is done the best it can be? How can we discriminate among the countless technological tools that will not only enable but improve our life’s work? The people, and organizations, that find the right answers will help define the future in our uncertain world.