Consulting Drucker: Principles and Lessons from the World’s Leading Management Consultant

Peter Drucker is renowned as a management guru and has authored several books on good management practices. This book is written by one of his students (a consultant and management professor himself) in an attempt to distill Drucker’s ideas in one book. Not surprisingly, the book provides an overview of Drucker’s life, focusing on his time after he migrated to the United States. The main emphasis is on his interactions with his students and clients. Subsequent chapters discuss management philosophy drawing from Drucker’s ideas, including anecdotes from both Drucker’s and the author’s consulting practices as well as examples from other areas.

The book has a total of seventeen chapters. The first three focus on Drucker’s life, the breaks he got and the challenges he overcame. Chapter 4 discusses the characteristics of a successful consulting business. This is based primarily not only on Drucker’s experiences but also those of the author. The next eleven chapters focus on management principles that Drucker felt were key drivers to any organization (for-profit or not-for-profit). These chapters tend to start with a general hypothesis and develop it further through examples and anecdotes that could come from several different sources. While there is mention of Drucker’s contribution to these principles, it is sometimes difficult to recognize which portions of the contributions are from Drucker, which are from the author, and which are from contemporary management literature. In applying these principles, it may not be important where these concepts originated; however, from a historical perspective, these distinctions do have relevancy. The last chapter focuses on ten observations that the author believe are relevant to understanding Drucker. The book concludes with an appendix that reproduces articles written by managers or management consultants about Drucker.

The narrative is easy to read, and most chapters are around fifteen pages long. Readers may come away feeling that there are just too many examples and anecdotes for each point made. A summary of the main points at the end of the management theory chapters would help those who want to ensure that they picked up on all major aspects presented in the chapter. Most readers are likely to flip through some of the examples, and may not read the book in order. Given the book’s organization, it permits this kind of reading.