Chapter Nine. The Objective of Marketing Is to Make Selling Unnecessary

Peter Drucker was a management professor. He didn’t teach marketing as a separate function. At least I didn’t think so as he began to lecture one night in the spring of 1976. Outside Harper Hall, it was dark and it was raining. Someone had rearranged the seating, and we were now seated in long tables facing a wall with windows.

I had only recently left my position as the head of research and development at an engineering company, as described in the last chapter. I was then working as an executive recruiter in Sherman Oaks, about twenty miles west of my home in Pasadena. Because of the rain, I left work early. I stopped at home in Pasadena, which was a straight shot on the ...

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