| Visit to Peter Drucker, September 1999 |
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The title of his 1999 fall semester course is: "The Effective Decision." Already some time before the beginning of the lecture, Peter Drucker has arrived at the hall. He wears light-colored linen trousers, a checkered shirt and a blue baseball jacket. The casual character of Drucker's wardrobe is also reflected in his behaviour: He chats with students, autographs books and, with visible delight, eats donuts provided by his assistants. The scene is a lecture hall at the Peter F. Drucker Graduate School of Management in Claremont, a small university town about an hour's drive east of Los Angeles. Here, every Saturday between one and four o'clock, Drucker lectures to the approximately sixty students of the Advanced Executive Management Class. Many of the students are already over forty and have vocational experience; some, like a group of young Indians, have come a long way to see and hear Drucker. All of them were drawn to Claremont by Drucker's reputation as "father of modern management." Drucker understands management in the traditional sense as a "liberal art," as a subject that builds bridges between different academic disciplines. Drucker's interdisciplinary approach is also expressed in the choice of faculty and in the curriculum of the Drucker Management School. "The Effective Decision" also does not limit itself to the field of economics. This week for instance, Drucker urges his students to concern themselves only with the process of decision-making and not with the background situation: "Don't try to solve it, try to understand it." Drucker is a passionate and experienced teacher. Knowledge seems to be almost casually conveyed by him, for instance through anecdotes, the punch-lines of which he skilfully times. Time and again during the lecture, Drucker tries to actively involve the students and let them have their own say. With good reason: the older students already have vocational experience and can relate their concrete management practice to the younger students. Several times, Drucker also puts direct questions to the auditorium. The answers are then repeated slowly and loudly by students in the first row so that Drucker, who wears two hearing aids, can also understand them. The variety of topics Drucker touches on during the course of his lectures is remarkable, especially as he never loses the connection to the actual topic. In the current lecture for instance, Drucker talks within a small amount of time about: his own experiences as a consultant to the US Department of Defence; a remark of Winston Churchill on a decisive battle of the First World War; the unsuccessful attempts of General Motors to beat the Japanese car industry with their own weapons; the architect-visionary Buckminster Fuller and the media theorist Marshall McLuhan, both of whom Drucker was closely befriended with long before they became world famous.>> Marshall McLuhan about Peter Drucker |
| Class with Peter Drucker: bridging the sciences and centuries |