Drucker on Marketing: Lessons from the World's Most Influential Business Thinker

Chapter 25With Drucker into the Future

Peter Drucker spent a good deal of his life writing about and predicting the future. Much has been covered in this volume on this subject because one cannot look at Drucker and avoid his particular brand of unique management fortune-telling. Drucker himself understood this, probably because there is little doubt that being able to predict the future and knowing “the shape of things to come,” fair or not, constitute a significant competitive advantage for any marketer, indeed for any manager. However, we should not talk about Drucker’s spectacular success as a management fortune-teller without first noting that his initial public prediction was a bust. It was a prediction published shortly before the stock ...