“For the first time in human history, individuals can expect to outlive organizations. This creates a totally new challenge: What to do with the second half of one’s life?” – Peter Drucker, “Managing Oneself,” Harvard Business Review, March-April 1999 and Management Challenges for the 21st Century (HarperBusiness, 1999)
Exactly 25 years ago, Peter Drucker first published these prescient words, six years before his death at 95. His message has only grown in importance.
How to navigate the second half of life, with all the uncertainties about when this half starts, and how long it lasts, is now being approached in a serious way by the Drucker School of Management, part of Claremont Graduate University, in Claremont, California. It has created a new certificate program, SOAR, which stands for Seek, Observe, Act, and Renew. Applications are still open, and it is set to begin this spring, with additional cohorts later this year and in 2025.
I’ve been a member of the SOAR advisory committee for the past year, and have found it to be a fascinating experience. The committee is led by Steve Tarr, a Fellow of the Drucker School, who was interviewed about the program in January by Richard Eisenberg for the MarketWatch article “Retirement-reinvention programs can cost a fortune. These options slash the cost 90%.”
SOAR will have face-to-face components in Claremont plus some related digital activities. It is partially built around the interdisciplinary (or what CGU calls transdisciplinary) values that were so much a part of Drucker’s life and career: self-exploration and exploration with others about meaning and purpose in life, and where that fits into what Drucker called “a functioning society,” drawing on lessons from the visual arts, literature, and the art of conversation.
In its explanatory material, the school outlines that SOAR has been heavily influenced by Drucker’s own roots in how he found new beginnings in Claremont in his early sixties, having moved there in 1971 after 20 years teaching at New York University.
Though he was already well known worldwide at that point, the transition was the beginning of a prolific 34 years, during which he wrote many groundbreaking books and articles. It also marked the transformation of CGU’s management school into the Drucker School of Management in 1987, as well as his pioneering efforts for the school’s Executive MBA program.
Drucker was his own best advertisement for midlife renewal and productive longevity, themes I explore in my recent article for Leader to Leader, “Frances Hesselbein And Peter Drucker: Masterclasses In Productive Longevity.” It appears in the Fall 2023 special commemorative issue for Frances Hesselbein, Drucker’s longtime collaborator, who passed away in December 2022 at the age of 107.
In keeping with the interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary nature of SOAR, the faculty represents a variety of academic specializations and disciplines:
Drucker School of Management
David Sprott Henry Y. Hwang Dean, and Professor of Marketing
Katharina Pick Clinical Associate Professor
Jeremy Hunter Associate Professor of Practice, and Founding Director of the Executive Mind Leadership Institute
Kristine Kawamura Clinical Professor of Management
Hideki Yamawaki Ito Chair of International Business and Professor of Management
School of Arts & Humanities
Lori Anne Ferrell Dean, and Director of the Early Modern Studies Program and the Kingsley & Kate Tufts Poetry Awards
Patricia Easton Professor of Humanities; and Executive Vice President and Provost, Claremont Graduate University
Joshua Goode Associate Professor of Cultural Studies
Quality of Life Research Center
Jeanne Nakamura Associate Professor, Co-director (and longtime collaborator with the late CGU professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi)
Anyone interested in these topics, and the possibility of pursuing them within SOAR or other programs, would do well to refer to questions Drucker recommended to college and graduate students in his May 1966 Harper’s Magazine essay, “The Romantic Generation,” later included in the 1971 collection Men, Ideas & Politics (now titled Peter F. Drucker on Business and Society). He wondered how, in a “society of big organizations,” an individual could “maintain his integrity and privacy.”
He proposed three questions, which he maintained were old inquiries that perhaps needed to be examined in different ways: “Who Am I?;” “What am I?;” and “What should I be?”
He wrote about a variation on this theme, for a wider audience of readers, in the 1969 book The Age of Discontinuity. The questions individuals must ask of themselves in this version also start with “Who Am I?” However, the next two are: “What do I want to be?” and “What do I want to put into life and what do I want to get out of it?” These are timeless questions, and indeed some of the people who may be interested in SOAR were not yet born when Drucker first wrote them. The search for answers may lead to a fulfilling second half of life.