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A Class with Drucker: The Lost Lessons of the World's Greatest Management Teacher

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Peter Drucker was William Cohen's professor "in probably the first executive PhD program in management in academic history" from 1975 until 1979 and Cohen was the first graduate of this program at Claremont Graduate School. His classes with Drucker met once a week, beginning at 4:30 PM and resumed after a dinner break, continuing until at least 10 PM but sometimes later. These were lecture courses without use of notes but Drucker, a master of the Socratic method of teaching, encouraged Q&A exchanges with students. ("In answering a question he might go off in an unexpected direction which seemingly had nothing to do with the question asked. Before you knew it, he was giving a lecture within a lecture.") He attracted so many students that his classes met in the largest room available. He used the same textbook for all his classes (Management: Tasks, Responsibilities and Practices) and never used a teaching assistant to grade for him. During the dinner break, instructors and students from various classes gathered at an open bar and then dinner in the Faculty Club. Cohen occasionally found himself seated with a group that included Drucker.

What we have in this volume is a wealth of Cohen's memories of those years as a student at Claremont Graduate School, his reflections on what he learned from Peter Drucker, and discussions of how those lessons were then applied in his personal life and especially in his career. "I have tried to come close to capturing his actual words, but in any case, I believe I achieved the spirit of what he said and how he said it. My aim is to put the reader in the classroom as if he were there with me at the time hearing Drucker and participating in every interaction I had with him." Cohen succeeds brilliantly in achieving these and other objectives.

If there were a business counterpart to the Mount Rushmore National Memorial, Peter Drucker would be among those selected for such an honor. (Who else? That's an interesting question but the whole idea would no doubt have appalled Drucker.) Of special interest to me is what I learned about his teaching style. Cohen obviously accumulated an abundance of notes, old papers, and other sources of information from or about his several years of their association with "The Father of Modern Management." As Cohen repeatedly suggests, Drucker had a unique talent for "cutting right to the heart of the [given] issue." Among the several lessons that Cohen learned and shares, these are the ones that caught my eye:

"The first task of any business management is to decide what business it was in."

"What everyone `knows' is frequently wrong."

"Outstanding performance is inconsistent with fear of failure."

"Selling and marketing are neither synonymous nor complementary. One could consider them adversarial in some cases. There is no doubt that if marketing were done perfectly, selling, in the actual sense of the word, would be unnecessary."

"The first systematic book on leadership [i.e. The Persian Expedition or Anabasis] was written by Xenophon more than 2,000 years ago, and it is still the best."

To them I presume to add an observation Drucker made in an article published in the Harvard Business Review years before, in 1963: "There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all."

Cohen notes that Drucker once asked two questions of Jack Welch that then guided and informed his leadership of GE after he succeeded Reggie Jones as its new CEO. "If you weren't already in the business, would you enter it today?" followed by a second, more difficult question, "What are you going to do about it?" Today, other CEOs should carefully consider the importance of these questions, answer them, and then proceed accordingly. "Drucker taught what to do. He was very specific about this. However, he did not teach how to do it." One of this book's substantial value-added benefits is that, throughout his narrative, Cohen offers his own observations and suggestions as to how to achieve the various business objectives that Drucker recommends, accompanied by dozens of relevant examples to illustrate key points. Those who share my high regard for Peter Drucker's life and work will be as appreciative as I am of what William Cohen shares in this volume.

Among the 40 books written by Peter Drucker (November 19, 1909-November 11, 2005), my personal favorites include The Practice of Management (1954), The Effective Executive (1966), Management: Tasks, Responsibilities and Practices (1973), Adventures of a Bystander (1998), Peter Drucker on the Profession of Management (1998), The Essential Drucker: The Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker's Essential Writings on Management (2001), The Effective Executive (Revised Edition, 2002), Classic Drucker: From the Pages of Harvard Business Review (2006), and People and Performance: The Best of Peter Drucker on Management (2007).

I became an entrepreneur and business owner after I graduated school, so I never took business courses - especially at the graduate level. My customers have taught me some, I had some mentors and family advice, but mostly I have learned from by either making mistakes or having successes in my stores. And I am a firm believer in learning from books.
Business books seem to be about 80-20. 80% stinkers, 20% valuable. And then every so often that 20% turns out to have real gem. This book from Dr Cohen is a gem, with a lot of good, practical advice I can apply immediately to improve my bottom line. If you believe in continuing your business education with books, get this one. The advice is Peter Drucker's, and Dr Cohen fully credits the ideas to him, but I credit Dr Cohen for making these lessons readable, understandable, and easy to apply. Bravo!

Peter Drucker is revered as a management guru and his books and articles have been a mainstay in business reading for decades. Even if you have read some of his books, don't you think you should read more? But maybe you have read everything and wish there was something more. We see similar market hunger from the devotees of artists and musicians who have died. These folks look for anything not released or some draft versions of works.

William Cohen was working on his executive Ph.D. at Claremont when he studied with Drucker. While most of us know Drucker from his writings, and a much smaller number from presentations, a minuscule number of people were able to sit in his classrooms. Cohen has combed his notes and recollections to put together 19 chapters of what it was like to study with Drucker as a student and the lessons he learned from him.

It is an interesting enough book and Cohen does make contributions of his own. Just don't mistake this for a book BY Drucker and you will be just fine. While I would recommend starting with Drucker's classic works, this is a good supplement to the great man's direct offerings for those who want even more.

Reviewed by Craig Matteson, Ann Arbor, MI

William Cohen studied with management guru Peter Drucker while working toward his Ph.D. in executive management at Claremont Graduate School (now the Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management). The lessons he learned from Drucker, he says, were life-changing, and in this book he aims to transmit to his readers the great man's wisdom. In fact, Drucker took a somewhat different approach with his students from the one in his books and articles. Thus, Cohen builds upon and reinterprets many of Drucker's insights and concepts. getAbstract particularly recommends this book to managers who are already Drucker fans and want to learn more - the book is really more like a CD of unreleased recordings by a great artist of the past than like an album of covers by a lesser artist.

Author William A. Cohen was a struggling young Air Force officer with no academic experience when he entered Drucker's PhD program in management, becoming the first graduate of Drucker's doctoral program. He used his newfound insights to further career and to gain a deeper insight into Drucker's approach and personality: A CLASS WITH DRUCKER reflects his experiences, expanding upon Drucker's lessons, revealing the teacher's personality through personal anecdotes, and providing fine tips on how Drucker's management tools continue to be applied in everyday business circles. Any business library needs A CLASS WITH DRUCKER.

William Cohen is the first graduate of Claremont University's PhD in Management program; Peter Drucker was his lead instructor. The value of the book is that it contains a few good insights from the best known management consultant; the downside is that the book is mostly filler, and the topic's inherent difficulty.

The inherent difficulty in studying the field of management is that it is impossible to create an all-inclusive management control panel for monitoring - a conclusion propounded by Drucker himself. Key variables differ in each situation - eg. an executive's personality, the importance of future products vs. improved current offerings, etc. Drucker's unique contribution was an ability to cut through the morass of each firm's uniqueness at a high level, and offer valued recommendations to various firms, from G.M. to G.E.

Nonetheless, some Drucker generalizations are uniquely applicable. These include:

"The first task of any business management is to decide what business it is in." (Allows focus.)

"What everyone know is frequently wrong." (Drucker illustrated this maxim by relating how Kaiser, lacking knowledge of how the English quickly built transport ships during WWII, developed a much quicker system. On the other hand, history is also replete with examples where ignorance was a serious flaw.)

"Continuing what led to past success will invariable lead to future failure - the environment will eventually change." (Examples include the explosion of energy costs, A.F. drones becoming available, the Internet and computers, new environmental laws, etc.)

"If you weren't already in the business, would you enter it today? If not, what are you going to do about it?"

"Great advances in any field rarely come from a single discipline. Rather, they come from advances in one discipline being transplanted to another sphere." (A likely example will be improving health care costs and quality through application of the Toyota production system.)

"Outstanding performance is inconsistent with the fear of failure."

Watch out for global competitors.

"CEO's are overpaid - should be in the range of 20X the average worker. Unions have become unaccountable for costs and performance."

Recommends written objectives for managers. (MBO)

"Self-development is up to the individual."

"Lead, don't manage. Don't use Theory X, nor a permissive form of Theory Y (creates chaos)."

The author of this book is a hack and I think that Peter Drucker would not be happy that Cohen is using "Drucker" in the title merely to sell a book that is 50% the author's opinions. All-in-all, a reader would get more value out of reading any of Drucker's actual work, especially his articles in the Harvard Business Journal.