He first talks about thinking by contrasting it with another decision-making mode, conditioned response. The focus is on approach, the questions to ask oneself, and above all, thinking. They differ from weighty chapters at Harvard Business School, which detail the operations of the entity being scrutinized.ĭrucker’s are brush strokes, maybe three or four pages each, sketching a situation.

In one respect, though, this management class is very much like every other: It uses case studies of real-life situations.ĭrucker’s 50 cases are in a little blue book just 179 pages long.

“The audience was absolutely taken with him,” said Dorothy Hearn, PacBell director of corporate television. The other day he conducted a lecture over Pacific Bell’s internal television network that was seen by more than 2,000 employees.

A new book, “Managing for the Future,” is due out in March. At 82, he carries a full course load and does more besides. There are no slides, movies or overhead charts. (Managers are hired for 20-year stints only, for one.) Another topic might be the rich cotton fields of a remote agricultural area in China, which Drucker visited, and why the idea failed (no one had taken into account the huge transportation problem in getting the cotton out).Īll the while, Drucker is knitting, knitting, knitting these ideas into an examination of the decision-making process, the thinking process, the learning process. In the course of one class he might talk about the great Rothschild fortune and why it is probably the best-preserved family wealth in history. Often, it is a cross-training exercise for the brain. With Drucker’s consent, I have been attending his executive-education and MBA classes at Claremont during the current session.

Peter drucker look over the shoulder