A Class with Drucker - Headway | Work on yourself

16 ■ A CLASS WITH DRUCKER
denly conclude and you would realize that everything tied together. He felt
that you needed all this additional information to understand his answer.
Peter was not a captivating speaker by his style or manner of speech.
In fact, his Viennese accent sometimes detracted from his style, but his
content was always right on the money. If you stayed engaged you would
learn a lot and you would receive invaluable wisdom you could gain
nowhere else.
Sometimes he would get stuck. He couldn’t remember an individual’s
name, a company, or perhaps where he was going to go <strong>with</strong> his lecture.
Most speakers or instructors in this predicament just go somewhere else
<strong>with</strong> their presentation. Not Peter, his eyes would roll up as if trying to
find the information in a file—in many ways I guess he was—then invariably
he would find it and say exactly what he had intended. He never
failed to find what he was looking for in his “mind file.” It must have been
a great filing system. I’m kind of sorry I never asked about it, since it was
so clearly effective.
Another sign of his independence was that he did not always go by the
clock. He completed his lectures when he was done, not when the clock
said it was time. However, when it came to the break for dinner, he was
always on time. So, I knew that he knew what he was doing, and controlling
his time. However, classes were supposed to end at 10:00 PM. (Note
I said PM not AM—these were all evening classes). This didn’t always
happen. Early on, I was in a class that went to 11:00 PM and I stayed until
the end. But after this, I walked out of his classes that went this late. I’ll
have more to say on my walking out on Peter and its consequences in a
later chapter.
<strong>Drucker</strong> the Man
I think it important for you, the reader, to understand Peter <strong>Drucker</strong>, the
man, and what people thought about him. He was a complex human
being. Ethnically Jewish, he was raised a Protestant. 2 Although his father
also taught at a university, the family wealth came from being one of the
largest retail furriers in Europe and owning a department store in Vienna.
Peter was an academic, but he never did what many, if not most, academics
considered acceptable academic research. Professor James O’Toole at the
University of Southern California noted that he would never have attained
tenure in most top-tiered universities. 3 And, as I mentioned, I encountered