The Definitive Drucker

FOREWORD

I did not realize it at the time, but I grew up with Peter Drucker. My father spent 25 years in management at GE, and another decade at Chase Manhattan. He met Peter at GE’s Crotonville facility in the 1950s and always had Drucker’s books on his bookshelf. Though I had no interest in business as a high school or undergraduate student, I flipped through my father’s books—Drucker classics such as The Effective Executive and The Practice of Management. Later, when I was in the U.S. Navy, I grew more interested in business while running service and retail operations at a U.S. airbase in Japan, and returned to those and other classics. Slowly but surely, I was becoming a Drucker student.

Regrettably, I did not take the initiative to meet ...