A Class with Drucker - Headway | Work on yourself

174 ■ A CLASS WITH DRUCKER
first systematic book on leadership was written by Xenophon more than
2,000 years ago, and it is still the best.”
Who Was Xenophon?
Some of us were immediately motivated to research Xenophon, the
ancient Greek author. I am ashamed to say that I was not in this group. I
felt that I had more important things to read, and anyway, translations
into English from the ancient Greek always struck me as stilted and boring.
When I finally decided that after all, this work was cited as the best
book on leadership, a field of prime interest to me, and was recommended
by Peter <strong>Drucker</strong>, I reversed myself. I learned that Xenophon was
a general and the leadership he wrote about was leadership in battle. Here
was the greatest management thinker of our time claiming that the best
book on leadership (at least as of 1978) was not written by Warren
Bennis, Tom Peters, or Kenneth Blanchard, but by a somewhat obscure
Greek general who died two millennia ago! The importance of <strong>Drucker</strong>’s
statement had finally sunk in.
<strong>Drucker</strong>’s Interest in the Military
<strong>Drucker</strong> spoke <strong>with</strong> such confidence and expertise in so many areas that
I did not notice anything special about his use of military examples while
I was his student. I rarely felt compelled to get into a discussion <strong>with</strong> him
on military matters. However, after my graduation from Claremont, and
as I advanced in my Air Force career, Peter and I had a number of conversations
about the military, war, and its political involvements and relationships.
The extent of his knowledge was surprising. Peter wrote for
Foreign Affairs as well as The Harvard Business Review, but his understanding
of military strategy, especially about the American Civil War, was considerable.
However, he did not share the knowledge that he had this
particular interest <strong>with</strong> many.
His knowledge of the organizational structure and culture of the German
and Austrian-Hungarian military of the World War I era was also impressive.
I learned much from our discussions, including that it was the use of the
railroad during the American Civil War on which the German Army based
its system of mobilization and which enabled them to bring together such
large numbers of troops so rapidly at the beginning of World War I.