1930s
1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s
talking with PETER DRUCKER
1990s 2000s
interview by REBECCA T. GODWIN
Peter Drucker, the father of modern management, published 38 books in his lifetime, including his study of General Motors, Concept of Corporation. Drucker taught at Bennington from 1942 to 1949. He spoke with the editor of Bennington in 1999, when the Peter Drucker Fund for Educational Innovation was established.
“
On Continuity, Change, Community wo weeks before his death in 1519, Leonardo da Vinci wrote in response to his great nephew who had asked him, ‘Uncle, what was the world like when you were born, 75 years ago?’ He wrote, “My dear nephew, nobody who hasn’t lived before 1490 can possibly imagine what the world was like when I was born, nor can it be explained to him.’ We live now in one of those transition periods—in Western society the last one was the American revolution to the end of the Napoleonic wars—and it’s very hard to explain. In every one of those periods the values are reformed—the fundamentals do not change; the configuration does. “This is what I’ve been basically wrestling with for about 70 years. The balance between continuity and change is the critical balance in such a period, and the basic values have to be preserved or reasserted. We are
1 8 • B E N N I N GTO N M AG A Z I N E
maybe two-thirds of the way through such a period in this country; in the rest of the world, perhaps only just beginning. “The old communities were coercive communities—99 percent of humanity had no choice; you were born into the life you were going to lead. Everybody knew, even in this extremely mobile country, that the only way you could get away from your community was to physically migrate to Iowa—which about 80 percent of the people around here did in 1830, 1840. And those communities are pretty much gone, including the ones which I still knew when I grew up in Europe. “But new communities are forming, and they are affinity communities. It may only be the local tennis club or your local church or your profession. A son-inlaw of mine is a fairly well-known physicist, and his community is 187 particle physicists all over the world. He knows every one of them, they are in daily contact; and outside of that group, I don’t think he knows anyone, except his own children; the same I see all over. I teach an advanced executive program and one of the ablest of my students is a Catholic nun who runs a remedial elementary school program in Southern California. Her community is not her fellow nuns; she doesn’t live in the convent anymore. Her community is 60 remedial educators whom she talks to once a week on the Internet. Mostly they exchange experiences. And she knows about these people—about their children, their interests—but she doesn’t know where they are. These are true communities, in the sense that they share interests and, above all, they trust each other. “I think one of the reasons we have the trouble in the school systems is that the school is no longer a community. It’s no longer a focus of common interest; it is a place, rather than a community. “I’ve done a lot of work with mega-churches, and I consider them to be one of the most significant social phenomena in this country in the last 20 years. Most of the people who are drawn to them are not seeking only a spiritual experience, a personal experience, but they are looking for a community experience. The great majority are young, double-earner professional couples; their parents were blue collar or farmers. They are very much alone in the big city, in need of community. These megachurches might say Baptist on the door, but 90 percent are non-denominational. I know one with 4,000 people, a Catholic church. Most of the communicants are Jews. I don’t