The Drucker Lectures: Essential Lessons on Management, Society and Economy

PART I1940s

By the time the 1940s rolled around, many of the seminal events that would shape Peter Drucker’s core philosophy had already unfolded. Most notably, the Nazis—who burned and banned some of Drucker’s earliest writings—had swept across Europe, prompting the Austrian native to leave for England in 1933 and then immigrate to the United States in 1937. In between, while attending a Cambridge University lecture by economist John Maynard Keynes, he had an epiphany: “I suddenly realized that Keynes and all the brilliant economic students in the room were interested in the behavior of commodities while I was interested in the behavior of people.” In 1939, Drucker wrote The End of Economic Man, exploring the rise of fascism on the continent ...