Preface

The title of this volume notwithstanding, I really have no idea what Peter Drucker would do. The truth is, nobody does. Charles Handy, the British social philosopher, remarked that Drucker “revels in surprising you.” The writer Jeffrey Krames has observed that Drucker had a penchant for coming up with “counterintuitive ideas,” while one of his former Ph.D. students explained it like this: Drucker was “frequently unpredictable and almost always provocative and original.”

Nevertheless, for nearly four years now, I have written “The Drucker Difference” column for Bloomberg Businessweek (formerly BusinessWeek) online, in an effort to provide a sense of how Drucker might react to issues dominating today’s headlines.

To say that mining Drucker’s 39 books, along with his countless magazine and newspaper articles, has been a privilege would be a gross understatement. I love crafting “The Drucker Difference” in what I’ve come to regard as a biweekly attempt to achieve some kind of mind meld with one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century.