Rick Wartzman: All Related Content

In the mid-1970s, Peter Drucker stood before a group of executives at New York University and listened to one of them gripe about his struggles in a difficult economy. Drucker offered a bit of advice, but the executive evidently was not persuaded.

"I don't think that will work for me," the man said in an exchange recounted in John Tarrant's book, Drucker: The Man Who Invented the Corporate Society.

"Then you had better go out of business," Drucker replied. "There is no law that says a company must last forever."

With the economy sputtering and the future unclear, managers everywhere are looking for answers. Or, more precisely, many are bent on finding the answer--the single strategy that will allow them to weather these turbulent times.

Is this the moment to scale back? Or is this an opportunity to swallow up assets on the cheap? Should the organization stay the course? Or should it tack in a new direction? To Peter Drucker, the answer to such questions could always be summed up in three words: It all depends.

At no point did the witnesses acknowledge errors in judgment, a management ``travesty,'' said Rick Wartzman, director of the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California. He is also a former Wall Street Journal reporter, editor and business columnist.

After storms ravaged Iowa last summer, devastation wasn't the only thing that people found amid the flood waters. Scores of out-of-work electricians from Michigan, hard hit by auto industry cutbacks, spied opportunity.

Trekking hundreds of miles from home, where the unemployment rate of 8.5% is the highest in the U.S., they were eager to scoop up jobs rewiring Cedar Rapids -- even if it meant sleeping in a tent for weeks on end.

Few books have caused as big a stir as John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, when it was published in April 1939. By May, it was the nation’s number one bestseller, but in Kern County, California -- the Joads’ newfound home -- the book was burned publicly and banned from library shelves. Obscene in the Extreme tells the remarkable story behind this fit of censorship.

For those of you who never bothered to pay attention to your mother, perhaps you'll listen to Peter Drucker, the father of modern management, instead.

This cheeky thought has crept into my head a couple of times in the last few weeks as I've noticed a run of stories about etiquette (or lack thereof) in the workplace. Most recently, there was the case study posted on this Web site (BusinessWeek.com, 8/12/08) about a worker who had to deal with a boorish boss.

It's been a bummer of a summer, hasn't it?

At the gas station the other night, I found myself staring in disbelief—as I have for weeks—while the numbers on the pump kept spiraling higher and higher. The total: $67.83 to fill my Passat. I hopped back in my car and flipped on the radio, figuring a little music might take my mind off the lightness of my wallet, but the news came on instead: Fannie Mae (FNM) and Freddie Mac (FRE) were reeling. Nervous depositors had stormed IndyMac Bancorp, looking to pull their money. General Motors (GM) was poised for another round of cuts.

When the House passed legislation in late June that expanded protections for disabled people, it marked an important step forward on an important issue. But what the workplace needs, even more than a new law, is an old insight -- one first offered by Peter Drucker more than 40 years ago.

"To make strength productive is the unique purpose of organization," Drucker wrote in his 1967 classic, The Effective Executive. "It cannot, of course, overcome the weaknesses with which each of us is abundantly endowed. But it can make them irrelevant."

A few years ago, I heard writer Gerald Haslam explain his struggle to describe the difference between the Kern County burg of Bakersfield and the Bay Area city of Mill Valley, both of which are settings for his novel, "Straight White Male."

"Then it suddenly occurred to me," he said. "There was nobody in Bakersfield who cared whether Tibet was free."

After the brutal bust of 2001, we didn’t expect new masses of multimillionaires to reappear around here quite so fast. But they did -- and this time, no recession will send them packing. A 2008 field guide to a new, super-driven kind of upper class -- whose motives and morés, like it or not, are now part of our DNA.

John D. Rockefeller has been described in many different ways: as greedy and cutthroat, as munificent and caring, as "solitary, taciturn, remote, and ascetic," in the words of author Daniel Yergin. But as a manager, perhaps Rockefeller's most indispensable quality was this: He was uncompromisingly forward-looking.

It was Rockefeller, more than any single figure, who helped revolutionize the way people in the 19th century illuminated their homes, hastening the shift from costly whale oil to kerosene -- a fuel that was, as he put it, "cheap and good."