Auto Bailout: What Drucker Would Have Said

In the mid-1970s, Peter Drucker stood before a group of executives at New York University and listened to one of them gripe about his struggles in a difficult economy. Drucker offered a bit of advice, but the executive evidently was not persuaded.

“I don’t think that will work for me,” the man said in an exchange recounted in John Tarrant’s book Drucker: The Man Who Invented the Corporate Society.

“Then you had better go out of business,” Drucker replied. “There is no law that says a company must last forever.”

I imagine Drucker would have said pretty much the same thing had he been able to spend a few minutes with the CEOs of the Big Three automakers as they trekked to Capitol Hill this week to plead for $25 billion in federal relief.