China Embraces Old-School Business Guru from the Wall Street Journal. It's talking about what Bright China is doing to spread the wisdom of Peter F. Drucker, a management guru who recently passed away with a series of academies, donations to libraries of translations of Peter Drucker's books, and more.

I have mixed feelings on the article. The characterization of the US as being behind on following Drucker verses China is not 100% accurate. For the Drucker Societies that is true. In the US we had the luxury of a live Peter Drucker for many years and a management university that bears his name, The Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management. This made it so the Drucker Societies were not needed in the US, since we had the crutch of Peter being around. So any meeting in the US will have a lot of alumni of the Drucker Business School (like me) and the Drucker Societies are just starting in the US.

Peter Drucker has had a huge impact on business including his consulting(GE, P&G, Intel, etc.), books he has written defining the study of management, and his non-profit consulting (girl scouts, etc.). His books continue to be huge sellers in the US and new collections of his articles are being published all the time. This indicates to me there is still a lot of interest in Drucker's teachings in the US.

The challenge and opportunity is to harness this to build up the Drucker Societies in the US. I am involved with the Drucker Society of Los Angeles and we just had our first real event today, a great presentation called Closing the Responsibility Gap. The societies in China, South Korea, and Japan have been around for years so of course they are ahead of the US Societies that are relatively new.

Labels: Peter F Drucker