A Year with Peter Drucker - 52 Weeks of Coaching for Leadership Effectiveness

Week 47

Making Ourselves Useful to Others and to Ourselves

Introduction

Peter Drucker’s article “The Unfashionable Kierkegaard” was first published in the Sewanee Review (1949, pp. 587–602). He considered it his finest essay.⁹¹ It was republished in 1993 as chapter 30 in his book of essays The Ecological Vision.⁹² In his introduction there, he explains why the article was written, and why it was so important to him (p. 426): “‘The Unfashionable Kierkegaard,’ was thus written as an affirmation of the existential, the spiritual, the individual dimension of the Creature. It was written to assert that society is not enough—not even for society. It was written to affirm hope.”

We share immensely in the products of prosperity, ...