Management Lessons on Nothingness, Drawn from Art

Some of the world’s sharpest minds on management and leadership—Warren Bennis, Ken Blanchard, Charles Handy, Stephen Covey, Frances Hesselbein, and Jim Collins, among them—came to Southern California last week to lecture and help commemorate what would have been Peter Drucker’s hundredth birthday. The speakers’ remarks, in which they linked Drucker’s ideas and ideals to their own, were chock-full of insight and inspiration.

And yet it was another Drucker Centennial event—the Monday night opening of a Japanese art exhibition—that left the biggest impression on me.

The Sanso Collection, as it’s known, contains about 200 paintings, roughly half of which are associated with Zen Buddhism. Drucker, who in addition to being a management professor once taught Japanese art, loved these pieces. And he’d often use them as an excuse to pause and ponder and see the world in a different way.