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

PART IV1970s

Of all of Peter Drucker’s achievements—advising captains of industry and heads of state, coming up with the term “knowledge worker,” winning the Presidential Medal of Freedom—the most remarkable may be this: In 1974, his 800-plus-page tome, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, vaulted past The Joy of Sex on the national best-seller list. Many authors would have considered publishing a definitive work such as Management the capstone of their career, especially if they had been writing for more than four decades already. Not Drucker. Astonishingly, the 1970s marked not an end for him, but a fresh start of sorts; two-thirds of his 39 books would be published after he reached age 65. Drucker would later trace his indefatigability ...