This is the 10th anniversary of my first book, Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life, published by Berrett-Koehler.
I have written earlier about the origins of the book (including the long and nonlinear path it took from initial idea to eventual publication a number of years later) in such posts as “How a New Business/Self-Development Book Had Its Genesis in a Library School Class,” for LexisNexis Government Info Pro and two years later in “25 Years of Drucker,” for the same website.
I’m planning on writing a series of posts about the book to mark the occasion of the tenth anniversary. For this first post, I am focusing and reflecting on some of the changes related to it over the past decade. I set out to write an ‘evergreen’ book that wouldn’t easily date, and I believe that I accomplished that aim. But that doesn’t mean that some things don’t change.
In mid-2011, about a year and a half after the book’s publication, I became Managing Editor of Leader to Leader. As a wonderful instance of synchronicity, I work closely with LTL Editor-in-Chief Frances Hesselbein, who wrote the foreword to Living in More Than One World, and who was such an important part of Peter Drucker’s life and work.
I’m thrilled to note that the book’s editor, Johanna Vondeling, was named President and Publisher of Berrett-Koehler earlier this year. The book in its current form would never have happened without her. I wrote the following in the acknowledgments: “She had the vision and patience to realize there was a strong central idea in my book, but that it was not the one I originally brought to her. She also helped give the book the structure it required.”
Chapter 3 of the book is ‘Creating Your Future,’ which happily led to my second book, Create Your Future the Peter Drucker Way. My fantastic agent, John Willig, who connected me with Johanna and BK, sold book 2 to McGraw-Hill, and I’m happy to say that John and I still work together. I’m also pleased to remain an active member of the Berrett-Koehler author community.
On a more somber note, there have been deaths in the past decade of people I wrote about in my first book. Doris Drucker, Peter’s wife of 68 years, whom I wrote about extensively in the book, died at the age of 103, in 2014. After her death, I commemorated her life in my post “Doris Drucker: A Remarkable Life.” Last year, Bob Buford, one of Peter’s closest friends and professional colleagues, died at 78. I also wrote about him extensively in the book, and after his death I wrote about “The Meaningful Life of Bob Buford: Friend, Associate and Chronicler of Peter Drucker.” I had also written about Peter, Doris, and Bob years earlier for USA TODAY.
Other Drucker friends/colleagues that I wrote about in the book also passed away were T. George Harris (see my post “The “Deeper Sense of Purpose” of T. George Harris, a Collaborator and Friend of Peter Drucker“); and Max De Pree, the longtime CEO and Chairman of Herman Miller, whom I posted about in “Max De Pree, Peter Drucker and the Art of Leadership.”
And on a deeply personal note, both of my parents, Paul and Harriet Rosenstein, whom I wrote about in the acknowledgments of Living in More Than One World, died in the intervening years; my father at 95 in 2011 and my mother at 90 in 2014 (ironically, a month after Doris Drucker’s passing).
Over the next few months, I will post about other aspects of Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life, and how they relate to the world of today and tomorrow.
{This post originally appeared on my LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/peter-drucker-beyond-living-more-than-one-world-10-bruce-rosenstein/}