Coffee House Book Review – “The Drucker Lectures” by Peter F. Drucker

One of the new features I will be adding to my blog this year is what I’m calling the “Coffee House Book Review”, which will feature reviews on books from the fields of leadership, management, marketing, and other areas of interest to those who are running or managing a business or organization. To start off this new series, I’d like to share my review of the book “The Drucker Lectures: Essential Lessons on Management, Society, and Economy” which I received as a review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Often referred to as the “father of modern management”, Peter Drucker was a writer and management consultant who wrote numerous books and spoke extensively on the field of management and the way organizations operated. Although this book at times offers a glimpse of the origins for the concepts he later shared in some of his more well-known works, what is more interesting is the fact that several of these lectures – most of which date to over two decades ago – could have easily been written to address some of the challenges businesses and society face today.

Of course, having coined the term “knowledge worker”, many of the lectures featured in this book touch on the realities of today’s information age. In his 1981 lecture “Managing the Increasing Complexity of Large Organizations”, Drucker makes a very strong argument against leaders who think their job is simply to tell their employees what to do. As he points out, it’s the employees who now hold an organization’s specialized knowledge and as such, leaders should work with their employees to determine how to best apply this information toward their goals.

In another lecture he gave in 1987, Drucker draws the analogy of organizations becoming more like a symphony orchestra, “in which you will have fewer layers of management and many more specialists”. In this talk, he shares the story of how

Vienna Philharmonic conductor Gustav Mahler changed how orchestras perform by having his musicians on duty for five nights, but only playing for four nights. On the fifth night, Mahler had the musicians sit in the audience to hear how their colleagues play together. Drucker uses this story to illustrate the need for organizations to make their employees more aware of what their organization is doing by “putting them on a task force, or by moving them from one speciality to another, or perhaps by making them go back to school”.

Although Drucker is often referred to as being an expert on management and organizations, he preferred instead to view himself as a “social ecologist” in the sense that he was “concerned with man’s man-made environment the way the natural ecologist studies the biological environment”. Indeed, it is pointed out in one of the chapter introductions how Drucker would take up a non-related field of interest and spend several years learning about that particular discipline in order to understand what correlations or ideas it might foster.

As such, instead of simply being a book that shares his ideas about management and the knowledge worker, “The Drucker Lectures” also provide us with an opportunity to appreciate the inter-relationship Drucker saw between the various disciplines. It’s also the reason why some of his most thought-provoking lectures are not on management, but on the field of education.

For example, I enjoyed reading his examinations of how our education systems currently operate, why they are built the way they are, and what we should expect from them. In one of these speeches, Drucker makes the point that education systems in the future will need to shift from teaching children information to teaching them how to learn, as learning is no longer something that you stop doing the minute you leave school. One only needs to look at our current education systems to see that this is certainly the challenge that schools will need to address in the years to come.

Despite the fact that these lectures cover a variety of subjects, the book is not difficult to follow or read, thanks to how the editor both complied and presented these lectures which allows the reader to easily digest the ideas presented, as well being able to select which talks might be of particular interest for them to read.

For those who enjoy Peter Drucker’s writings, there’s no doubt that “The Drucker Lectures” will be an enjoyable read as it allows the reader to gain a better impression of the man who was behind so many of the ideas we have about management today.  For anyone who has an interest in management and the economic and social challenges that stand before us, “The Drucker Lectures” is a curious reminder of how the problems we face today are not new ones, but issues that have been there all along. It’s also a much needed reminder that we had better address these issues soon before they truly become insurmountable.

You can buy “The Drucker Lectures: Essential Lessons on Management, Society, and Economy” on Amazon.com or Amazon.ca for Canadian readers.