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

Introduction

You can picture him perched on the edge of a classroom table, peering through thick glasses at the students who hang on his every word. His baritone voice washes over the room, his Austrian accent as thick as a Sachertorte.

He doesn’t refer to any written notes. But every now and again, his eyes roll back in his head and he pauses, almost like a computer downloading a store of information, before returning to his point and underscoring it with a new set of facts and figures.

His protean mind meanders from topic to topic—a discussion on cost accounting bleeding into a riff on Mesopotamian city-states before he veers into a lesson on the history of higher education or health care. But, somehow, he magically ties it all together in ...