A Class with Drucker - Headway | Work on yourself

C H A P T E R T W E L V E
We’re All Accountable
P eter
had a good sense of humor. I don’t mean to describe him as
so jocular that he was always cracking jokes. That wouldn’t be true. Still, he
was far from humorless or uptight. I was not surprised when I read in Doris
<strong>Drucker</strong>’s memoirs, Invent Radium or I’ll Pull Your Hair (The University of
Chicago Press, 2004), to hear that the future Mrs. <strong>Drucker</strong>’s mother referred
to him not necessarily very flatteringly as “that happy-go-lucky Austrian,
Peter <strong>Drucker</strong>.” Her mother can probably be forgiven. Peter was not wellknown
in those days and she wanted her daughter to marry a Rothschild.
By the end of my second year at Claremont, I had decided that on earning
my doctorate, I would leave business and join academia. This was
because of Peter and a marketing professor, Professor Leonard Parsons,
from whom I had taken a course in marketing management. Of course,
one doesn’t typically give two years’ notice in a business, and by then I was
a senior manager reporting to the vice president of a major corporation. So