Recently I was interviewed, via email and in English, by the Brazilian publication Administradores, for a major feature (in Portuguese only) on Peter Drucker. The Portuguese translation of my book, O Legado De Peter Drucker, was published last year in Brazil by Campus Elsevier. The premise of the article was who, if anyone, could be considered to be a successor to Peter Drucker. An idea that came to mind as I thought of my responses was “Drucker as His Own Successor.” I don’t mean that in a flippant way. In the five and a half years since his death at age 95, there has been an explosion of Drucker-related research and writing. We understand so much more about his work, given the many books and articles that have been published since then. We have greater access to his work, with the increased ability to buy even his more obscure book titles online. And of course many of his books are available in digital format, which was, for the most part, not the case during his lifetime. The same goes for online videos. This increased access to his ideas, and ideas inspired by or about him, means that we have more and better ways to apply those ideas in our own life and work.
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.”