Dinner With Drucker
My Life-Changing 2002 Peter Drucker Interview in Los Angeles
An original essay for Drucker+, by Bruce Rosenstein - Bruce has studied Drucker’s work for more than 35 years, and is the author of Create Your Future the Peter Drucker Way (2013), and Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life (2009).
Twenty three years ago, on a June Sunday evening in Los Angeles, I spent four remarkable hours interviewing Peter Drucker. He was 92 years old, and set to give a keynote address early the following morning for the SLA/Special Libraries Association annual conference of organizational/business librarians at the Los Angeles Convention Center.
Although I was a librarian at the time working for USA TODAY and a longtime member of SLA, my main motivation for traveling from my home in the Washington, D.C. area was to interview Drucker for a feature article that ultimately ran in USA TODAY early the following month.
Drucker made the 40 mile trip from his home in Claremont, CA, where he was teaching at the Drucker School of Management, part of the Claremont Graduate University. We were both staying at the same hotel, the somewhat-futuristic Westin Bonaventure. It was the first time I had interviewed him in person; although I interviewed him on earlier occasions for USA TODAY, where I was a reference librarian from 1987-2008, by trading faxes. By the time of the interview, I had already written a number of pieces for the paper on books by and about Drucker.
“Your first question, whether there has ever been anything like the present unfolding of scandal after scandal? This is normal,” Drucker says at the start of the interview. “This is the fourth time in my life that I have been through it, and they are all alike.”
The success of that interview, and the subsequent article, “Scandals Nothing New to Business Guru,” emboldened me a few months later to finally start on an idea I had long considered, to write a book about Drucker and the individual, as opposed to Drucker and the organization. I hadn’t written a book before, and did not suspect how long the process would take: Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life was published nearly seven years later, in 2009.
Drucker and I had agreed during a brief phone call the week before to meet at the bar of the Westin Bonaventure. We met at the specified time, along with USA TODAY photographer Robert Hanashiro, whom Drucker seemed surprised to see. The three of us soon went to Drucker’s room to start the interview while Robert shot photos.
When Robert was finished, Drucker and I walked what seemed like a considerable distance to a Japanese restaurant within the sprawling hotel complex for the rest of the interview. He had a bad knee and walked slowly, so it took longer than I thought to arrive. We did not finish until nearly 11 PM. I was mentally drained after it was all over, and was amazed that Drucker, at 92, seemed so fresh for the keynote less than twelve hours later.
The SLA conference that year had two keynote speakers; Drucker on Monday morning and the author/historian Doris Kearns Goodwin on Tuesday morning. Material about Drucker’s compelling keynote and standing ovation comprised part of my USA TODAY article.
The book applies the principles of Drucker, whom many consider to be the “father of modern management,” by encouraging the pursuit of a more multidimensional life. It is based on more than 20 years of research into Drucker’s life, including several interviews with him.
Behind the Scenes of the Interview
A number of things had to happen in order for me to do the interview, which in retrospect changed my life and led to my becoming an author. In 2001, Jeff De Cagna, who was then editor of SLA’s publication Information Outlook (which unfortunately ceased publication five years ago). assigned me to write a column, “All About Drucker,” for the eight months leading up to the conference.
As it got closer to June, I wanted to try for an in-person interview for USA TODAY. I had been writing about business and management books for the publication since 1996, while still working there as a librarian. Around the same time, St. Martin’s Press published Managing in the Next Society, a compendium of Drucker’s articles from The Economist and other publications, such as Leader to Leader (where I have been Managing Editor since 2011), Harvard Business Review, Atlantic Monthly and The Wall Street Journal.
“The brilliant ones are always the ones who get caught.””
The book’s publication became my route to getting the interview. My editors, Michael Clements and Jacqueline Blais, said they would consider a feature article if I could get Drucker talking about the corporate scandals of the time (Enron and others). That worked out perfectly, as shown by this sample quote from the interview and the feature story: “The brilliant ones are always the ones who get caught.”
Michael and Jacqueline said I should also interview other people with connections to Drucker to get multiple viewpoints on his life and work. In the days after the keynote, while still in Los Angeles for the rest of the conference, I did phone interviews with the late Warren Bennis, the dean of leadership writers/scholars; and Gary Hamel, one of the world’s most important management authors, both of whom were quoted in the article.
When I returned to Washington, I talked for the first time to Marilyn Thomsen, who was then working in communications for the Drucker School/CGU. She facilitated additional brief phone interviews with two of Drucker’s former students: California representative David Dreier, who served in Congress from 1980-2013 and at the time was chairman of the House Rules Committee, and Nancy Baxter, who was then regional investment manager for Wells Fargo in Pasadena.
Marilyn and I later became longtime friends, and she was instrumental in the early stages of research for the first book. She was a student of Drucker’s who later received her Ph.D. from CGU, and returned to Claremont in 2022 as Associate director, News and Strategic Content at Pomona College.
A further peg to the article, which we did not know about until it was announced after the interview but before publication, was that Drucker, later in July, would be awarded by President Bush the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. During our interview at the restaurant, when I told Drucker I lived in the DC area, he remarked that he would be traveling there soon but was “sworn to secrecy” about why.
Reinventing Himself at 95
During the next several years, Drucker and I conducted in-person interviews in Claremont for my book. In late 2004 came one of his most popular books, The Daily Drucker. Upon its publication, I interviewed him via fax for a USA TODAY article, “Drucker’s Reinventing Himself at Age 95.” One year later, he died eight days before his 96th birthday. I happened to be in Claremont that week for the Drucker School’s “Drucker Day,” and wrote his obituary for the paper. He did not live long enough to see my book’s publication, or even to know that I had finally found a publisher, California-based Berrett-Koehler.
Before and after the first book’s publication, I had full circle conference experiences. In 2006 (Baltimore) and 2011 (Philadelphia), I delivered Drucker-based presentations at SLA annual conferences. By 2011, I was no longer a librarian and had transitioned to full-time writing and editing.
I’m convinced that the first book, as well as Create Your Future the Peter Drucker Way, my 2013 book, would not exist if so many things had not come together for the 2002 Los Angeles conference and interview with Drucker.
About Bruce
Bruce Rosenstein is Managing Editor of Leader to Leader, published by Wiley and The Frances Hesselbein Leadership Forum. He is the author of Create Your Future the Peter Drucker Way (2013), and Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life (2009). He writes “The Peter Drucker Files” blog for Psychology Today, and has studied Drucker’s work for more than 35 years. He worked for USA TODAY from 1987–2008, and was a longtime adjunct professor at The Catholic University of America Department of Information Sciences.
