VERY LITTLE FAILED TO FASCINATE ECLECTIC SCHOLAR DRUCKER

Date: Saturday, November 26, 2005

Peter Drucker, who died Nov. 11 just short of his 96th birthday, has been called "the man who invented management" but that is a far too limited view of someone who took delight in a wide variety of subjects.

In his honor, the Claremont Institute posted a 1984 interview with Drucker, conducted by Peter Schramm, Ken Masugi and Larry Arnn, that appeared in the Claremont Review of Books. Schramm is executive director of the Ashbrook Center for Public Affairs at Ashland University in Ohio, whose blog NoLeft Turns.ashbrook.org pointed me to the interview (at http://claremont.org/writings/ 051111drucker.html). Masugi, whom I met several times when he was teaching at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, is director of the Center for Local Government at the Claremont Institute, and Arnn is the president of Hillsdale College.

I wouldn't have spent so many words on identifying all these people except to make the point that Drucker's influence extended far beyond business and management.

The Review asked Drucker, then a professor at the Claremont Graduate School, why he was teaching Japanese art.

He explained that in 1934, by chance, he visited an exhibition of Japanese painting in London "and I became an instant addict. I've never learned anything unless I teach it. I decided on my 70th birthday, after 40 years of being an amateur, I had better learn. And my Japanese art course (as any of the students will tell you) uses Japanese art to teach what is really Oriental culture, to put the Orient into perspective. I'm an old journalist, and all journalists know an infinite number of trivia."

He adds, "I have to hear myself talk before I know what I am saying. I have to write it," something he believes is very typical of writers.

During the interview he says repeatedly that he is not an economist, and that if he ever was he gave up the idea when he took an economics seminar from John Maynard Keynes at Cambridge in 1933-'34. "I'm not a bit interested in the behavior of commodities, and only interested in the behavior of people."

Still, knowing about the behavior of people allowed Drucker to see things about the behavior of commodities that were not readily apparent to others. He predicted, in 1973, that the Arab oil boycott would fail. "All a cartel does is signal the end of the dominance of its industry. That's it. And people will, when petroleum becomes expensive, find ways of doing with less. People will switch to different cars."

Which is pretty much what happened, and continues to happen.

Economics is an important way of looking at things, he concedes, but it isn't all there is. Still on the theme of oil, he says, "go back to the Depression, gasoline consumption didn't go down at all because people in this country discovered that wheels are more important than food. Freedom is more important than food. Now that is not an economic fact."

Part of the reason he ended up studying management, he explains, is that he could get information about businesses that he couldn't get about other kinds of institutions. General Motors famously invited him to study its operations, as The Economist points out in its profile of him in the Nov. 19 issue, and the resulting book, The Concept of the Corporation, transformed American institutional life while having no effect on GM itself.

The study of management ended up in business schools, Drucker says, because political scientists weren't interested in it. He was teaching at Bennington College when the book came out, and the president there told him, " 'Peter, this is the end of your academic career. Economists and political scientists won't have anything to do with you.' And he was absolutely right."

Someone who reviewed the book in a prestigious scholarly journal concluded by saying "It is to be hoped that the next book of this promising young scholar will address itself to a respectable topic." Of course, the book has been in print ever since and many of its observations are now so much a commonplace that it doesn't seem as original now as it really was then.

People had hardly started to think seriously about how institutions work. "Here is Ken Galbraith," Drucker says, "who writes a book which argues that there exist two institutions: first the government and then business. It never occurred to Ken that Harvard University is a very powerful institution. I once said to Ken, an old friend, at dinner, 'Your last book is a tour de force but, you know, from a Harvard professor, no mention of the university as an institution is a little funny.' And he looked at me and said, 'My God, I never thought of that.' And he doesn't know that the labor union and the hospital are institutions."

The Graduate School of Management at Claremont is now named for Peter Drucker and Masatoshi Ito, but given how broad his interests were, his name could plausibly grace just about any building on campus.

Except physics. He writes about nearly everything, he told the Review, but not that.