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

The Drucker Lectures : Essential Lessons on Management, Society and Economy by Peter F. Drucker
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I'm a fan of Drucker's and I really liked "The Effective Executive", but this collection of essays still surprised me, and very pleasantly. He has a quote at a certain point:

"Every 3 or 4 years I pick a new subject. It may be Japanese art; it may be economics. So for more than 60 years I have kept on studying one subject at a time."

This is reflected in his lectures. He covers a great many topics, and I was constantly surprised at how prescient he was, from the 40s to the 2000s. There were a few faulty predictions here and there, and some odd statements (about how deregulation would make Japan richer, but was still socially unacceptable, as an example), but by and large many of his statements from over 40 years ago still apply today.

Some passages I highlighted:

"The Ford Motor Company, we say, abandoned the Edsel. Well, this is polite euphemism. You and I abandoned the Edsel."

"The moment you can manage, you are no longer underdeveloped. You may still be poor, but you know how to get out of poverty fast."

"for there is no more conservative cause in the most profound sense of the words than the maintenance of the balance between man and his environment."

"American education tomorrow will no longer assume that one stops working when one starts working"

"Until very recently, there was no industry around for which the basic technological foundations had not been laid before World War I"

"Information is something that is pertinent to the task that can be converted into knowledge. And knowledge is information in action."

"He found in the orchestra's contract that they had to play five evenings, and he said, "No, you are going to be on duty 5 evenings, but you play 4. The fifth evening you sit out in the audience and listen.""

"And let me say the greatest weakness of our nonprofit institutions is that they don't reimburse. They have tremendous resistance against acquiring additional knowledge and skill on the part of their people, and it's stupid. It's very, very shortsighted, and it doesn't save anything. It costs money."

"74% of the people who work for Toyota are not on the Toyota payroll but on the payroll of contractors, suppliers, and have been for a long time. This is what makes "life-time employment" possible in Japan"

5 fundamental questions that every enterprise, profit or nonprofit, should be required to answer: What is our mission? Who is our customer? What does the customer value? What are our results? What is our plan?"

"And when the job becomes simply a a place to hang your hat, when it's "Thank God It's Friday", when you being to play games with yourself so that it makes the job more complicated, then you are bored. And boredom is a deadly disease."

"If you had no Department of Agriculture, would we now start one?"

"Whenever you do something of significance, whenever you are making an important decision, and especially whenever you are making a decision about people, you write down what you expect the results to be."

"The department stores in the United States and Japan are in terrible trouble" (written in 1996)

"No organization can possibly survive if it is both labor intensive and capital intensive. This is Economics 101."

"Is there a world economy? The answer is both yes and no. Economically, the world is becoming steadily more integrated. But politically the world is more likely to splinter."

"Total sales have tripled, while employment is a quarter of what it was. They think the company has become more productive. No. It has outsourced."

"one of the major challenges ahead is the fact that politics, military might, and economics no longer move in complete parallel but diverge."

"the fewer farmers there are, the more protection they get in every country"


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