Making Music with Drucker

As rockers, rappers, and country crooners scoop up their Grammy Awards this weekend, you can be certain that they’ll thank all kinds of people for helping to make them stars: producers, agents, the fans, and, of course, many a mom.

But there’s one Grammy winner of years past that feels it owes a debt to a very different sort of influence: Peter Drucker.

Pasadena (Calif.)–based Southwest Chamber Music has long drawn on Drucker’s insights to help it manage the enterprise effectively, as well as to tailor its musical selections. By constantly questioning which programs and strategies have become obsolete, Southwest offers some valuable lessons that can help any organization—no matter what kind of business it’s in—hit the right notes. “Reading Drucker became this incredible lightbulb for me,” says Jan Karlin, the executive director of Southwest, which snared Grammys in 2003 and 2004 for the first two volumes of the Complete Chamber Music of Carlos Chavez.