07/05/2002 – Updated 1:55 PM ET

Scandals Nothing New to Business Guru 

By Bruce Rosenstein, USA TODAY 

LOS ANGELES — At the age of 92, management guru Peter Drucker has seen it all before — market meltdowns, corporate accounting scandals, unethical behavior in the executive suite.

After all, he began working as a business journalist on his 20th birthday, Nov. 19, 1929 — less than a month after the great crash on Wall Street.

“Your first question, whether there has ever been anything like the present unfolding of scandal after scandal? This is normal,” Drucker says at the start of an interview. “This is the fourth time in my life that I have been through it, and they are all alike.”

Drucker’s professional life has spanned the Great Depression and World War II through the boom times of the ’50s and early ’60s to the stock market bubble of the ’90s and this year’s corporate scandals.

Along the way, Drucker has created a body of work on management that has earned him a Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award, which President Bush will present to him later this month. In announcing the award, the White House described Drucker as “the world’s foremost pioneer of management theory” and champion of such ideas as “privatization, management by objective and decentralization.”

Drucker sees the current plight of some once-mighty companies as the latest example of a cycle he has seen time and again.

“These are businesses that start legitimately and overreach themselves, and then they begin to play games,” he says.

“It all begins with the management having a brilliant idea,” he says. “The brilliant ones are always the ones who get caught. And the things they invent, by the way, always become the successes of the next period — cleansed of their excesses and their risks.”

Speaking the truth to power

Warren Bennis, a business professor at the University of Southern California and one of the world’s top authorities on leadership, has known Drucker for 50 years. “It can’t be overemphasized that he made management respectable both as a profession and as a field of study,” he says. “Peter’s question is always: for what? Leadership for what? Teamwork for what?”

“What makes him so wonderful,” Bennis says, “is that he’s a prophet without anything to sell. He speaks truth to power.”

Even in his 10th decade of life, Drucker is still speaking out, still lecturing and writing. And he still has no plans to retire (nor does his wife, who “is about the same age and still plays tournament tennis — and wins,” he says).

His recently published book, Managing in the Next Society (Truman Talley Books, $24.95), is a collection of articles for The Economist, the Harvard Business Review and other publications. He will have another out in November, A Functioning Society, featuring his best writing on social sciences. He also plans to write a book of history, A Contrarian’s History of the 20th Century. And he has more “online teaching devices” upcoming for Corpedia, an e-learning company.

During an interview here last month before he was to speak to a group of librarians, the father of modern management admitted he has made one concession to advancing age.

“I have slowed down, I don’t travel. The one thing that makes me very tired is traveling,” he says. “I do all my lectures now on video. I have Toronto this week, one of the world’s major international relief agencies next week, all by video.”

Los Angeles is about 40 miles from his home in Claremont, Calif., and it’s his one travel exception.

He no longer teaches regular classes at the Peter F. Drucker Graduate School of Management at Claremont University, but he will soon begin a series of 12 public lectures there and in Los Angeles. He is still consulting with for-profit and non-profit companies, but they have to travel to see him. He has a bad knee and walking is slow and difficult.

“If you want to diagram my work, he explains, “in the center is writing, then comes consulting, then comes teaching. I’ve never been primarily an academic. I like to teach because that’s the way I learn.”

For the interview, Drucker is dressed in a gray, Organization-Man suit, with a brown-and-white patterned shirt, no tie and brushed-suede shoes. He speaks slowly and deliberately, with frequent pauses, but he has a booming, commanding voice and a keen sense of humor. He wears hearing aids in both ears, but for the interview one is not working, and the other is on the blink. He is somewhat bent over, and walks with a cane. He smiles easily.

Drucker still speaks with a heavy German accent, reflective of his native Vienna. He settled in the USA in 1937, working as a journalist for British and American publications, and later became a professor and a consultant. He has written nearly three dozen books and countless articles. His first book, The End of Economic Man, published in 1939, was favorably reviewed by Winston Churchill.

Drucker’s 1954 book, The Practice of Management, is considered one of the most important management works of all time, and he has introduced many key concepts into the world of business, such as management by objectives and the importance of knowledge workers.

John Flaherty, former dean of the business school at Pace University in New York, and author of Peter Drucker: Shaping the Managerial Mind, says Drucker is “still relevant because his fundamentals are still relevant there is no other thinker out there who has done a more clear job and better job on the fundamentals.”

Flaherty acknowledges that reading and fully comprehending Drucker takes some effort: “As Dickens says: All learning is not fun; you have to dig in.”

During the interview and speech to the librarians, Drucker refers often to his wife Doris, a physicist, inventor, entrepreneur, patent agent and writer. They have been married 65 years. After the first part of the interview, he leaves a phone message for her, beginning “Hello, my darling “

A well-rounded workaholic

If he’s a workaholic, at least he is a well-rounded one.

He is completing a three-year project of rereading all of Shakespeare’s plays — the two remaining are The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest — and he has been a long-time collector of Japanese art, on which he is considered an authority. Non-profit organizations are close to his heart, and he is the honorary chairman of the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Non-profit Management, founded in 1990.

“I have more consulting than ever,” Drucker says, “but I thought I had the most in non-profits. But it turned out I had an enormous amount of old, big-company clients coming back to me. European, Japanese and American; how to reposition themselves in the world economy.”

Drucker describes himself as a “one-man organization.”

“I don’t even have a secretary,” he says. “I just use a woman to do my typing, and I keep in touch with all my clients, even if I have no business with them for 20 years; they’re still friends.”

He especially likes working with small companies, “where you see results. My first client was General Motors; I started at the top and worked my way down.”

One of Drucker’s student success stories is Rep. David Dreier, R-Calif., chairman of the House Rules Committee, who took his first classes from Drucker as an undergraduate at Claremont McKenna College.

Dreier says Drucker “has this tremendous grasp of history and the ability to take it and apply it to current day challenges. He’s one of the most brilliant human beings I have ever known.”

Nancy Baxter, regional investment manager for Wells Fargo in Pasadena, Calif., is a former Drucker student with an MBA from Claremont who is now pursuing her Ph.D. there.

She says that as a teacher, Drucker is “absolutely remarkable I’ve never seen him work off notes.”

Gary Hamel, chairman of consultants Strategos, and co-author of a seminal business book, Competing for the Future, says Drucker has the rare ability to “blend breakthrough thinking with practical application. His single greatest contribution is to professionalize the work of management,” Hamel says. “He is the rare individual who can bridge theory and the world of practice.”

In a reflective moment toward the end of the interview, Drucker says, “At my age, one doesn’t pray for a long life, but for an easy death.”

“I’ve been on the job 24 hours, seven days a week since I was 20,” he tells the group of librarians, whose business-oriented Special Libraries Association was founded in 1909, the year of his birth. “I am a workaholic; so is my wife, thank God, or our marriage wouldn’t have lasted 65 years.”

During his speech — nearly 90 minutes — he sits alone onstage in a stuffed chair, holds his watch and occasionally glances at the time, and dangles the watch from his right hand while gesturing.

He never takes a sip of water, and has the timing of a comedian. He keeps the audience under a spell and is accorded rock star treatment, with standing ovations before and after his address. A throng of admirers follows him to the door.

Near the end of questions and answers, while advising to lead a life not solely tied to your job, he sounds a final note of qualification: “I’m an old consultant; do as I say, not as I do.”

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