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

PART V1980s

Drucker purists would probably cite his 1985 book Innovation and Entrepreneurship as the decade’s publishing highlight. But two other titles truly stand out: The Last of All Possible Worlds and The Temptation to Do Good. For these are novels—testaments to the fact that Drucker saw himself, first and foremost, as a writer (more than as a professor or a consultant or a “management guru,” a label he loathed). These works of fiction also underscore Drucker’s notion that “management is a liberal art,” and, as such, its practice should be informed by lessons of history, sociology, theology, psychology, literature, and more. Drucker himself was a polymath, as likely to read Jane Austen as Joseph Schumpeter, and he systematically drew on ...