Rick Wartzman’s What Would Drucker Do Now?

Peter Drucker would have appreciated the tone of the essays that comprise Rick Wartzman’s What Would Drucker Do Now? Wartzman writes in the Drucker spirit: tough-minded yet positive and fair, with a dose of good humor. He has been writing “The Drucker Difference” biweekly column for Bloomberg BusinessWeek since 2007, when he became Executive Director of The Drucker Institute, at the time a new entity. (Drucker died at 95 in November, 2005.) This collection shows how Wartzman plays off on topics in the news; generally in business but also politics, technology and other subjects, and relates their relevance to Drucker’s work.
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?