Twenty years ago today, on July 5, 2002, USA TODAY published my interview/feature story on Peter Drucker, “Scandals Nothing New to Business Guru.” He and I were both in Los Angeles for the SLA/Special Libraries Association annual conference of organizational/business librarians. I was an attendee and he was one of the keynote speakers; the other was the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. 2002 was the first time I had interviewed him in person; I’d interviewed him on earlier occasions for USA TODAY, where I was a reference librarian from 1987-2008, by trading faxes.
The success of that interview, conducted over four hours the night before his keynote, and the subsequent article, emboldened me a couple of months later to finally start on an idea I’d had for quite some time, to write a book about Drucker and the individual, as opposed to Drucker and the organization. The book was published nearly seven years later, in 2009: Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life.
I traveled to Los Angeles from my home in the Washington, D.C. area, and Drucker made the 40 mile trip from his home in Claremont, California; where he was teaching at the Drucker School of Management, part of the Claremont Graduate University. We were both staying at the same hotel, the somewhat-futuristic Westin Bonaventure.
We had agreed during a brief phone call the week before to meet at the bar. We met at the specified time, along with USAT photographer Robert Hanashiro, whom Drucker seemed surprised to see. The three of us then went to Drucker’s room to start the interview and shoot the photos.
When Robert was finished, Drucker and I walked what seemed like a considerable distance to a Japanese restaurant within the sprawling hotel complex for the rest of the interview. We did not finish until nearly 11 PM. Drucker, who was 92 at the time, delivered a standing-ovation keynote to a large audience early the following morning.
In retrospect, the stars aligned in a number of ways to make that interview happen. One year earlier, Jeff De Cagna, who was then editor of SLA’s publication Information Outlook (which unfortunately ceased publication two years ago) assigned me to write a column, “All About Drucker,” for the eight months leading up to the conference.
As the event drew closer, I wanted to try for an in-person interview for USA TODAY. Around the same time, St. Martin’s Press published Managing in the Next Society, a compendium of Drucker’s articles from The Economist and other publications, such as Leader to Leader (where I have been Managing Editor since 2011), Harvard Business Review, Atlantic Monthly and the Wall Street Journal.
The book’s publication became my route to getting the interview. My editors Michael Clements and Jacqueline Blais said they would consider a feature if I could get him talking about the corporate scandals of the era (Enron and others). That worked out perfectly. Sample quote: “The brilliant ones are always the ones who get caught.”
Michael and Jacqueline said I should interview others to get multiple viewpoints on Drucker’s life and work, which led to phone interviews in the following days with, among others, the late Warren Bennis, the dean of leadership writers/scholars; and Gary Hamel, one of the world’s most important management authors.
A further peg to the article, which we did not know about until it was announced after the interview but before publication, was that Drucker would be awarded, later in July, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.
During the next several years, Drucker and I conducted several in-person interviews in Claremont for my book. In late 2004 came one of his most popular books, The Daily Drucker. Upon its publication, I interviewed him via fax for the USA TODAY article “Drucker’s Reinventing Himself at Age 95.” One year later, he died eight days before his 96th birthday.
In 2006 (Baltimore) and 2011 (Philadelphia), I delivered Drucker-based presentations at SLA conferences. I’m convinced that Living in More Than One World and Create Your Future the Peter Drucker Way, my 2013 book, would not have happened if so many things had not come together for the 2002 Los Angeles conference and interview. The world has changed in many ways since that day. Yet much of Drucker’s work remains timeless, and will remain relevant long into the future.
