In an era of rapid technological and social change, in which new management jargons seem to rise even faster than the disruptive startups that coin them, the career of Peter Drucker is perhaps as instructive as his writings themselves. Why do his writings remain so fresh and vibrant today? How did he avoid both authoring passing fads and jumping on others’ bandwagons?
For one thing, he was a citizen of the world. Drucker himself lived in Austria, Germany, England, and eventually the United States. The upper middle classes of turn-of-the-century Vienna emphasized education, culture, art, music, historical consciousness, urbanity, and international openness, and Drucker learned from an astonishing array of his contemporaries — in his memoirs, Adventures of a Bystander, he recalls his acquaintances with luminaries like Buckminster Fuller, the physicist, and Marshall McLuhan, the communication scientist who popularized the phrase “global village.” Drucker did indeed inhabit such a village, and that cosmopolitanism surely helped him develop some of his trademark perspective.
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