PostNormal Times: Peter Drucker–Transdisciplinary Pioneer

PostNormal Times is a podcast for our complex reality and unpredictable world—a world where the stakes are high and innovation is crucial. Andrew Vosko, PhD, associate provost and director of transdisciplinary studies at CGU, and his guests explore ideas that transcend traditional academic boundaries and address our most pressing needs. Get ready to challenge your assumptions.

In season 2, episode 6 of PostNormal Times, Andrew Vosko sits down with Bernie Jaworski, the Peter F. Drucker Chair in Management and the Liberal Arts at CGU, and Trevor Anthony, a cultural studies PhD fellow at CGU, to discuss Peter Drucker, one of the 20th century’s great unrecognized transdisciplinarians.

Season 2, Episode 6 Transcript

ANDREW: Welcome to PostNormal Times, a podcast for our complex reality and unpredictable world, where the stakes are high, and innovation is crucial. In this series, I get to sit down with some of my favorite minds to explore new ideas that transcend traditional academic boundaries and address our most pressing needs. I’m Andrew Vosko, the George and Ronya Kozmetsky Transdisciplinary Chair and Associate Provost and Director, Transdisciplinary Studies at Claremont Graduate University. Welcome to the show.

I’d like to welcome everyone to another episode of PostNormal Times, where we don’t discuss business as usual, we discuss business including everything and the kitchen sink, in times that are unpredictable and when we don’t have the luxury of taking our time. Today on the theme of business (or maybe not on the theme of business), I have two really neat guests who I’m excited to have on the show to help us have a conversation around business, about what business could be. We’re looking at business as something that doesn’t exist on its own island, in its own silo, versus business as a critical component of a functioning society. So, with that, I’d like to introduce our first guest, who is the Peter F. Drucker Chair in Management and the Liberal Arts—you’ll correct me if I’m wrong there, but I think that’s what it is.

BERNIE: That’s correct.

ANDREW: Bernie Jaworski.

BERNIE: Nice to meet everybody. Good to be here and thank you for the invite. I’m looking forward to our conversation today.

ANDREW: Absolutely. Bernie and I have worked together at CGU in different administrative capacities over time, and I think our first conversation, like real conversation, was years ago, when I was the emcee of Drucker Day. I was introducing the theme of the day to celebrate the life and legacy of Peter Drucker, with the theme of a functioning society. And I remember, after that day, you pulled me aside because I had my own little interpretations that I got into during the emceeing. And you were like, “Yeah, you were spot-on with how Drucker’s teachings go.” So, you know, I took that as quite the compliment. I don’t know if you remember that because probably for you …

BERNIE: That brings us way back. Andy, yes, I do remember that.

ANDREW: It was before the pandemic. So, that stuck with me, and you validated me. So, thank you, and I’ve been holding on to that for quite a while.

BERNIE: Well-deserved.

ANDREW: Thank you. My other guest is Trevor Anthony, who is a cultural studies PhD fellow, as well as one of the fellows in our Transdisciplinary Studies office, who’s got a fascinating background that has spanned Yale Drama School and the IT world and who happens to be doing his dissertation work. You’ll get the theme here in a second, and I’ll let him explain that as an intro. But Trevor, it’s nice to have you on the show.

TREVOR: Thank you, Andy, I’m really pleased to be here and Bernie, happy to be sharing this with you.

ANDREW: So, Trevor, I wanted to open this up. What is your dissertation work going to be on? Or what is it on, such that people will start to gather what the theme of today’s show is about?

TREVOR: Well, it’s on a guy you may have heard about called Peter Drucker, from a cultural studies perspective. I discovered him through … I was a TA for a transdisciplinary studies class in Judeo-Christian thought across disciplines and one of the people in that class was a Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management student and we became friends. I traveled to the nonprofit he manages in New York and talked about what I work on. We were hanging out—this is probably a couple of years after we had been in the class together—and I was talking to him about my dissertation … and, you know, I’m looking at this idea of the way crises have become this big topic in cultural studies. We got to talking and a light bulb went off about Peter Drucker.

So, I really want to just emphasize first the transdisciplinary thing taking place by talking to people from different worlds. I discovered Drucker that way. And I’ve been going down the Peter Drucker rabbit hole. He’s kind of an undiscovered person in the humanities and in cultural studies. So I’m on the Peter Drucker bandwagon, if you will.

ANDREW: So, I think we’re going to interject real quick because not everybody at CGU knows enough about Peter Drucker by proximity: It’s the Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management. And so, we know that it’s a big name. We hear it a lot. But before I was at CGU, I just knew of the quotes that were probably misattributed to him, like the culture/strategy quote that people say, or the acknowledgment of Peter Drucker as the “father of modern management.” I had heard soundbites through time, but I didn’t know a whole lot about him till I got here.

So, for everybody listening who isn’t all that familiar with Peter Drucker: He is really a fascinating character who gets categorized in this category of business, even though at CGU, we’re more focused on management. But that’s another conversation that we can hopefully touch on. I think what Trevor’s saying, and even more subtly concerning Bernie’s chair named for Drucker, there’s a lot more to the person that’s worth unpacking. My thesis for today is that Peter Drucker is one of the 20th century’s great transdisciplinarians and he’s not recognized as such. And so, I want to bring some light to that part of the conversation, too. But before my own opinion, I want to ask Bernie: How did you become the chair in management and liberal arts à la Peter Drucker?

BERNIE: It’s been a funny journey for me. So, in my case, I was a very traditional academic for the first 15 years of my career. I became a tenured full professor at the University of Southern California, and I was doing traditional research and the A-level journals, participating in review boards, and doing all the things that you’d expect a traditional academic at a business school—in this case, business school, not management school—to be working on. The opportunity came up to actually leave and start an e-commerce practice within a very large global consulting company, with a friend who was leaving Harvard Business School at the time, and I met him on my sabbatical at Harvard.

So, I left. I thought I was going to leave for a year, maybe, and I disappeared for 10 years. I still wrote three books when I was there at the Monitor Group, and I still did reviews for journals and still participated as an academic, but I was now somebody halfway between academics and practice at that point.

So, I took over another practice after three years—a leadership practice, executive education practice—and I ran that for eight; my total time at Monitor was ten years. And towards the end, I said, “I’d like to get back into academics, but I got to play the game differently. I don’t want to go back to a traditional, completely research-oriented, tier-one place. I need to go to a place that respects the fact that I want to write cases, write books, and interact in practice.”

There’s a school in Switzerland called IMD, which was founded by Harvard and Nestlé back in the 1950s to serve an executive population. And the head of that, the president at the time, I was trying to do a joint venture with him on some of the things we’re doing at Monitor, and at some point, he said, “Why don’t you just join us?” I said, “Okay, you’re actually a really good fit for me.”

So, I joined IMD, and I was there just a few months before someone at the Drucker School reached out, saying, “We’ve been trying to fill this Drucker Chair for four or five years, and we just can’t find anybody who has a blend of a very practice-based perspective and a sufficient amount of academic credibility globally as a scholar. So, it’s a combination of the two, and it’s kind of hard to find it.” And I said, “I’m definitely interested in the Peter Drucker Chair. Who wouldn’t be?” And so, long story short, it took about a year to negotiate, and then we finally reached terms, and here we are. So, that was 2011. I’ve been in the faculty for 13 years and it’s been a real joy. So, I’m happy to take the conversation wherever you want to take it.

The only other data point that’s probably relevant here is that because I assumed that the Drucker chair would move into Drucker’s office, I felt responsible to learn some of the details of his work. So, I started teaching a course called Drucker Philosophy and then I teach another course called The Great Books of Drucker, where we focus on nine of his 36 books. So, at this point, I don’t know if I’m an expert, but I feel like I have a pretty good handle on his thinking, philosophy, and way of approaching problems.

And going back to your earlier point, there are two interesting data points. Number one is that from the time he got here in the 1970s until he passed away, he wrote half of his books. After he was 60–65, he wrote half his books. And the other thing is that half the books focus on a functioning society, and people don’t know that. As the father of modern management, people think of Drucker as management. But in a sense, he kind of backed into management.

From my reading—I never met the man—but from my reading of his work, I feel like he backed into management and leadership because he knew he wanted society to function well. His first two books in the 1930s focused on a functioning society. He wanted society to function well, having experienced and fled Nazi Germany, in the Austria area. For organizations to function well, they actually have to have good leadership in management, and that led him in that direction.

ANDREW: Well, I think that was a great runway to take off from. You planted a few things that we need to unpack, such as a “functioning society.” That’s an opaque and loaded term: “functioning,” according to whom? What is the lens through which Peter Drucker saw a functioning society, or is this interpreted by people who study Peter Drucker? Because I think there’s something important in there, and I think there’s something relevant about the time at which this was written. Let’s be academics, because we are, and explore what that actually means.

BERNIE: So let me take a cut in and I’ll let Trevor add color commentary along the way. So, the observation Drucker had in the 1940s and 1950s was that we moved away from an agrarian, farm-based society of small towns and individuals doing their own work, to a society that’s grown to be a society of organizations.

So, if you think about today’s society in the United States here, it’s largely a bunch of organizations. Now those organizations are not just businesses: They’re nonprofits, they’re governments, they’re regional, they’re national, they’re local, and they’re all kinds of flavors. But if you think about society as now being composed largely of organizations, then the question of whose responsibility it is to have society function well must turn to these organizations.

Organizations have a moral and ethical responsibility to help society function well. Now what does that mean in practical terms? What it means is organizations touch society in many ways. They touch society through the customers they serve, the employees they employ, and the ways in which they manage their supply chains, global carbon footprint, climate, and everything else. So, everything the organization does has to be judged in terms of, “Does it help society … ?”

So, if I’m paying employees a very good wage, they can live the promise of society and have social status and function in society. That’s very, very good. If I serve my customers in a way that’s ethical … I’m charging a fair price for what I’m doing and it’s all legally mandated and everything else, then that’s great. If I’m actually contributing to a positive environment, that’s good.

So, organizations end up being the unit of analysis of society. If you aggregate these units of analysis, you end up with society. It’s Drucker’s point of view that these organizations have to function well and contribute to society, within the boundaries of their legal remit, and within the boundaries of legitimate power that they hold. They have to give individuals within those organizations social status and function. If all that operates well, where the unit of analysis is the organization and all these are functioning well, then we have a well-functioning society.

ANDREW: You got me thinking a lot with that answer. Of course, a good answer means more questions. I’m going to direct them to Trevor next. It almost sounds like there is this cool mix of deontology and a utilitarian ethic that Drucker imposes by saying there is a good that’s involved that is just good, that you can tell is good because it’s right. And by doing something right, you create something that’s good for all the people. And you can see that at a level of an almost fractal organization, from the individual up to the larger organization and society, you can see the patterns kind of going in, just scaling up. That’s a neat way to explain how values get injected into a society and make it work.

Trevor, I want to ask you—I hate when people say through a cultural studies lens or as a cultural historian because then it becomes disciplinary armor, and it means that you’re not actually giving your own opinion—about the perspectives that you are bringing. Where would you say that this kind of organization that Bernie is describing—in a society that functions from an individual to an organization, which is really that unit that you pay most attention to and it becomes this holistic, working thing—is coming from, historically? Where is this coming from philosophically, that it makes sense in a certain context, or actually the opposite? Maybe this was completely novel when this came out and it didn’t make sense, and that was what was so impactful about it.

TREVOR: Well, let me try to connect two floating thoughts. One would be to the disciplinary space of cultural studies and the other to Drucker himself, his biography. Because, growing up, he developed, I think, from an early stage a respect for results. He saw the Old World collapsing. He was a young man around a lot of adults who held very powerful civil service positions, progressive people, powerful in government, and well-intentioned. But he was also seeing them fail. And so, I think very early he got this idea that results matter. And let me connect that to … I went from the fine arts to a 20-year career in business and technology, and then I guess I said, “Hey, let me get off this crazy thing and step back to think about it a bit because I’m seeing some real problems.”

I was running a company and I had, you know, young, talented employees who were having trouble communicating. They were well-educated and they really knew their stuff, but I was having trouble putting them in the positions I needed them to be in to talk to the executives who were our clients and that was a big red flag for me. I also worked for Paul Allen for a few years, the co-founder of Microsoft. And so, I was seeing some of the tech billionaire world from the inside, and seeing a lot of the ambition there. But I developed very quickly this idea that we can no longer afford to have technologists who aren’t also humanists. And so to me, there was always this artificial barrier between business and the humanities. To me, they’re the same thing.

But one of the shocks when I went back into academia and especially cultural studies was having come from a specific idea of criticality that … came out of the postwar Frankfurt School, of people trying to answer the big question of how the Nazi debacle happened. And of course, Mr. Drucker addressed this even before the war, he had some thoughts on that. But I was and I’m still working on this. And when I think that the important bridge between the humanities and Drucker’s work is that … the idea of a functioning society, a criticality, or a certain idea of criticalness can only get you so far because if you’re in a business every day, you’re relentlessly challenged with constructing things. To me, a new humanism, or a Drucker-inspired cultural studies, must build a bridge between the critical and the constructive … I don’t know if that’s totally the answer to your question, but I’m trying to zero-in here on what’s the bridge that needs to be built between a cultural studies ethos and where I think we need to go collectively.

ANDREW: So, I think you touched on some things that I want to come back to and maybe illuminate a little bit more. And Bernie, you mentioned this, too, before: The timing of these formative years with Peter Drucker, at least intellectually, was important. There was something about being alive with the collapse of a society or of what is normal, good, or decent in front of him, that had an impact on him.

It’s a really interesting point, and it’s actually something that we’ve threaded through the couple of seasons of this podcast. Every once in a while, we end up on this topic again: What happens when a world collapses, and a lot of our minds shut down? It’s just a black box, like, “I don’t know what happens when a world collapses. I’m going to put my head in the sand. I don’t want to think about it. I’m going to pretend like everything is as it was.”

But then sometimes you find people who actually do something about the world collapse. They learn how to change their direction. They learn how to adapt to a new world. And those are examples that we’ve talked about thus far. I think one thing that is interesting about the Peter Drucker story is there seems to be something to it where it wasn’t just adapting to a new world, it was creating a new world after one had collapsed, and that’s a different level of drive and courage.

I’m not deifying the man because I don’t know him well enough to do that, but there are a bunch of choices we can all make when a world collapses, and one of those choices is to construct a new one. For the two people who I know know Drucker best—at least in my immediate vicinity—am I off in this observation, or what’s a better way to add some edits to it so that it’s a little bit more accurate and a little less romantic?

BERNIE: Let me … so, you’re spot on, actually, Andy. … It’s a really interesting observation about trying to figure out, “How do we make this world a better place, and what’s necessary?” In 1945, he wrote this book called Concept of the Corporation, in which he went in and studied General Motors, which was controlling … about 1% of the US workforce worked at General Motors. And he studied General Motors. He tried to figure out what was working, not working, working well, not working well.

He made a lot of observations about large organizations. I’m not going to share them, but if you then migrate over to 1954, when he wrote The Practice of Management, this is the very first book that was broadly intended to help practitioners with the whole field of management, not just human resources, not just finance or accounting, not just manufacturing, but the whole way to think about how you holistically manage and lead an organization.

And even in that early phase, he saw organizations broadly and not just as businesses. In 1954 after he wrote this book, a lot of the subsequent work he did over the next 40 years could be traced back to it. I’m not sure if he would see it that way, but once you read all his work, you can go back and say, “Wow, that is the idea he was germinating in 1954.”

So let me just point out a couple of unique things the audience may not know. Because I think probably if I’m sitting in the audience and I’m listening to me, I’m thinking: management, structure, organization process, like all this machinery when you run your organization. But Drucker introduced the term mission. What he’s basically saying is, “What business are we in?” And that’s a really interesting observation. Well, we’re not in the business of producing products and technology; we should be in the business of trying to figure out what is the fundamental need that we’re addressing in society. What is the fundamental benefit for the population I want to serve? What is the benefit that I’m going to be giving them? Much higher order, right? In terms of …

So, if you’re in the business of a hospital, from a Drucker perspective … you’re not in the business of health care. You might be in the business of actually healing people or allowing individuals to be able to grow and develop, allowing individuals to be cared for. It’s a very different orientation, in terms of what the mission is.

A second ingredient of Drucker’s thinking is that organizations have to have values. When you think about that, think about him in 1954 saying “An organization has to have values,” because the values, in his words … vitamins are to the human body as values are to the organization. These are the guardrails for how an organization functions well. These guardrails are essential. You think about individuals saying, “I’m going to join this organization because it has the right values.” And I’m not making a judgment, by the way, as to what’s a good or bad value. I’m simply saying values …

People may decide to join that community because of the values and the mission. “I believe in the mission, the guardrails of the values and the culture”—what he called the esprit de corps of the organization. He also wrote about strategy and other ideas that we all think about. But what I’m getting at is that it’s not just that you’re producing results, to go back to Trevor’s point about meeting the needs of the marketplace in a particular way. But how you do it is very, very important to Drucker, and how you do it is through the guardrails of having really strong values about who you are as an organization. That’s a really profound observation today.

Seventy years ago, in 1954, it had to be a mind-blowing set of ideas. Because, keep in mind, in 1954 we had a society where, if you produced anything, it sold. In other words, we had demand far outstripping supply in the postwar era. Now we have supply far outstripping demand, and now you really need to worry about having good products and good services. Back then, if you put a product such as a car in the marketplace, it probably sold. So why do we need values? His way of thinking was very much consistent with … if you took, for example, a sociological, anthropological, or political science perspective—use that as a lens, as opposed to using a lens of business—you start getting a richer sense.

And just to end this whole thought, that’s why Drucker said management is a liberal art. Because at the end of the day, you can’t run these large organizations unless you know history, the psychology of human beings, small-group behavior, sociology, and the political environment of an organization. Drucker’s writing is all about history and English and examples and it pulls stuff in from different disciplines to try and explain a phenomenon. I guess maybe he’s early transdisciplinary in terms of the perspective. Big problems get solved through transdisciplinarity.

ANDREW: The only problem with me not cutting you off, Bernie, is that I’m also of the academic inclination, and so now I want to mention points that I thought of for every single thing you just said that inspired further thought and excitement. So, I’ve got to control myself for a second here. But one thing I wanted to introduce, that was non-academic, was that this idea that Peter Drucker brought into the new world he was creating, the one based on the values of organizations, was very reminiscent of one of the great queer iconic thinkers, Dolly Parton, who said, “Figure out who you are and be that on purpose.”

I feel like, in a lot of ways, people who’ve been in meetings with me here at CGU, know I’m like, “Well, who are we? Are we educators, or are we faculty members?” Two different things. And those kinds of questions warrant the next step: Figure out who you are and then act that way and do that. And I think that there’s a certain pragmatism and wisdom in the approach of looking at values and creating the norms of the world that you want to occupy. Let’s say you’ve got a clean slate of a world, or you’ve got a messy world that you need to repair … it’s got to be your values, as you said, that are the guardrails. That’s how you have to build upward.

One of the things I did want to ask both of you, maybe starting with Trevor, is this transdisciplinary idea of Drucker, that business—and maybe he backed into business, but when I read up on this, and it’s been a minute, he was attributed with being what was considered, or he called himself, a social ecologist. That screams transdisciplinary studies because there’s a system and a societal need involved. I mean, even Bernie, you mentioned before that, he was like, “You should be doing something in business that society needs.” That’s a transdisciplinary concept right there. You’re not researching because there’s a gap in the literature. You’re researching because there’s a need in society for you to be researching. This is the same parallel. So, the social ecologist, when I read that years ago, I’m like, “This man was doing this stuff that we think we’re doing now, but he was doing this (I think) in the 1930s. What was meant by that?”

Just so I don’t over-interpret and make it fit my paradigm, but—and I want to start with Trevor again—what is a social ecologist? You mentioned before that there was the Frankfurt School and there’s different schools of thought at different times. What was groundbreaking about being a social ecologist during the time when Peter Drucker came out and said this, relative to the context, relative to what his peers were doing—what kind of acceptance, or un-acceptance, would he have been given for saying like, “You know what? I’m gonna make up my own field, let’s see what happens?”

TREVOR: Wow, that’s a big question. No offense to the business school leader in this event, but I think arguably, if Peter Drucker were coming up now, he’d be starting a school of transdisciplinary studies. I think it’s a little rougher than that. You know he was driven out of his first teaching position at Frankfurt because of the Nazi intrusion. He was fired from his first teaching position at Sarah Lawrence College, which is a school for the arts and humanities because he wouldn’t subscribe to The Communist Manifesto at the time, and he was warned against publishing his book that Bernie just mentioned, Concept of the Corporation, because he was advised by, I believe it was the president of Bennington College, who said “Hey, you’re well-set up for a career in politics or economics, but what you’ve written is neither, and you’re going to trash your career.”

And Drucker being Drucker … he went full steam ahead. So first of all, transdisciplinary studies mean you have to be willing to risk crossing boundaries, and maybe you put your career at stake. So there’s a bravery about his moves that I just want to acknowledge there and then. When I came to the book, Concept of the Corporation, I was expecting, “This is how he’s going to announce his whole discourse on business management—you know, distill the 10 things you do.” What blew me away about that book is … most of it is philosophy. He talks more specifically about GM in his 1978 memoir, Adventures of a Bystander. He names names and he gives case studies that he does not in Concept of a Corporation.

His ultimate definition of GM was a portrait in federalism, which blew me away. He’s doing philosophy, political philosophy, in a book that you’re going in expecting to be about how to run a corporation. And so he’s making these moves. I know he’s been called a polymath, and that’s true, he’s making these big connections. I think that’s what it means. What I’m taking away about the social ecology thing is that cultural studies prides itself on drawing from sociology, anthropology, and political science. That’s totally what he was doing 40 years before cultural studies was founded. He’s way ahead of his time in that regard.

BERNIE: He called it the study of manmade environments. So, let’s call it person-made environments, meaning that an organization is a person-made environment. Organizations don’t exist out there: You and I get together and we form an organization. And then he’s trying to figure out, within those contexts, those manmade environments, how the individual interacts with society. How does society inform the individual? How does the individual interact with the community? He’s trying to study through that lens.

There’s an interesting question you could push back on and say, “Well, how’s it different than anthropology? What exactly is the boundary of anthropology versus social ecology?” This is where I’ve not really explored that issue or really hammered down what that looks like. I think for him, going back to what I mentioned earlier, the unit of analysis was somehow the organization for a lot of what he did, as opposed to “society,” which I think is the cutting point for a lot of anthropologists at some level.

And whether society is narrow or broad, they’re trying to understand it and how it functions. But that’s also a person-made environment. Societies have developed their norms, rituals, habits, and culture over time, like organizations. So maybe the cutting point for Drucker—although he doesn’t say this in the social ecology book—is that the unit of analysis for much of what he’s looking at in these person-made environments is, in fact, the organization, as opposed to society.

At the same time, to earlier points, he uses everything in his literary arsenal to think about it. He was a journalist. His PhD is in international law, but he became a journalist. Along the way, he was a financial analyst. He had so many articles written for Harper’s Bazaar and other periodicals, it’s just unbelievable. … I’ve not allocated time and attention to those Harper’s articles and all the other articles he was writing in the 1940s and 1950s, as you may have. But I’ve got to believe they were touching upon a lot of these issues that we’re raising just now.

ANDREW: With the term social ecologist, I’m going to chime in that between the idea of ecology and I think, the extensions of the study of ecosystems and your descriptions of specifically looking from self to society, there is almost a scalar organization of different human systems that feed into each other. There was a lot of systems thinking that was going on and maybe it isn’t your classic systems thinking, where you’re defining all of the elements, stocks, flows, and interconnections, but they really are maps of how things work automatically. Then you have all of the inputs and outputs and also what the products and driving forces of those things are. That’s something I love, when people can apply a version of a systems thinking approach to something that’s much more complex because then you take away from all the rugged individualism, entrepreneurial, and “If you just work hard enough, things happen” arguments. You understand that things happen when all of these other parts are working together, like a functioning society. That allows for innovation; it’s not that an innovator brings about a functioning society per se.

It’s like, don’t put the emphasis on the lone, romantic idea that somebody who is extraordinary did it. That being said, he was alone and extraordinary in a lot of ways.

Bernie, I’m guilty of listening to you on a podcast besides this one. One thing you said that was really interesting was that Peter Drucker was an optimist. I want both of you to weigh in on that because I think that’s far more impactful than we give it credit for. It’s not just something on a personality scale or a way to describe yourself on a dating app. I think it actually has major implications, but that’s my hint that I’m dropping. I’d like you both to unpack that a little bit.

BERNIE: What a really well-run organization does is allow the common person to deliver uncommon performance. That’s optimism to me. That’s a sense of, “Oh, OK, I can put people in a role, and I can develop them.” His focus was … the term he used … today, it may not sound as positive, but he wanted to develop competence. You don’t necessarily have to develop enormous expertise, but you need competence for these roles. He felt anybody with a normal mental endowment could become competent as a leader or as a manager. It’s not something you’re born to be. And in fact, he had a big argument in a lot of his work that he doesn’t like charismatic leaders. He likes quiet leaders, people who are behind the scenes helping others get where they’re going. In fact, the best you could say of a leader is that once the leader leaves the organization, the organization still functions really well. So it’s not what you’re doing in time period one, it’s what happens in time period two, when you’re no longer there, which is a mind-blowing idea.

One other data point, and then I’ll hand it over to Trevor. One idea I love about Drucker is when he always says whenever you look at something as a problem out there, what you’re trying to do is get it back to the status quo. “Boy, we have a problem out here. We got to fix the problem and get back to where we were.” Drucker said, let’s reframe that situation to be an opportunity. And if all of a sudden you see it as an opportunity, the aperture opens very wide, the lens … it’s like, “Whoa, I could do much better than the status quo.” You don’t even think of the status quo. You just think of it as well …

Good example: Let’s take a look at the immigration issues here in the United States. If you look at that as a problem, then OK, you’re probably going to fix the problem. If you look at it as an opportunity, you say, “Well, let’s …” Guess what? Right now, in U.S. society, and certainly other societies around the world, we have an aging population that cannot handle the needs of the economy moving forward. Japan is a prime example, but there’s others with similar issues.

If we can look at the immigrant population and say, “Is there an opportunity here, where the breadth of talent that’s in that immigration pool …” Some folks certainly are coming from very modest means and no formal education, but there’s a lot of folks who actually have advanced degrees. So, if I look at that population as an opportunity for us to really grow an economy, a sector, or something else as opposed to “Gee whiz, what a problem,” it’s a very different framing. In that sense, this notion of looking at opportunities versus problems, again, it’s a frame that for me suggests a certain level of optimism. So those are just two data points or examples.

ANDREW: All right. Trevor, tell me about optimism, Drucker, and a way to look at it in terms of a maybe current context.

TREVOR: Yeah, let me … the keyword process also comes to mind here. You know, results, process … and what I mean by that is, early on in his career, he’s writing stuff that could have come from a young Karl Marx about the alienation of the worker. And then he said, “Well, I didn’t understand businesses. I didn’t know anything about them. And then nobody else around me did. So, I figured out I better learn, so I’m going to do it by going inside of the business.” That was a radical step. Everybody you know, from Marx on down to the founders of cultural studies, continued to study business from the outside and in theory. I think once he stepped inside of a business in GM at this time, he saw things functioning. He saw a functional hierarchy. He saw diverse people working together toward a common purpose. And he saw a process. And he really starts to talk a lot about Frederick Taylor, the ways that industrial processes had been optimized, and the fact that people could be educated.

One of the case studies that he saw in 1943 was when GM got into a war footing and took people from outside the industrial experience, in one case, prostitutes, and trained them very quickly and made them efficient, happy, proud, and productive. He saw that this can work. So, results and process are the words that pop out to me. When you put yourself in a business, you don’t really have the luxury of being too much of a pessimist. You’re not going to last really long, to be really blunt about it. A lot happens because of where you choose to put yourself and where you put your focus.

ANDREW: That’s a really clever observation. You were in a class that I taught years ago where we talked about the C.P. Snow lecture on the difference between the arts, the humanities, and the sciences. This was coming right at the edge of the space race and the Cold War, and it represents the deviation from us believing that everything worth knowing in a knowledgeable society—not to take the knowledge society term from Drucker and confuse it—is from knowing the classics. And he turned it on its head, that a knowledgeable society is excited about new knowledge, and that was its turn from the humanities to the sciences.

Now the lecture was … an opportunity to criticize the folks in the academy within the literary elite, who were preventing him from ever getting anywhere by calling him a hack, essentially, because he was a physicist and he wanted to write books, literary works, and they’re like, “No, no, you’re not a great … you’re awful, get out of our club.” Then he gave this very impactful lecture about how the future of the world is science and not the humanities because science is optimistic and the humanities are not. They’re very, very dreary. They’re very, very critical. They’re very, very pessimistic.

And what we’re talking about now maybe is not the same exact thing, but it does make one wonder. This was an observation made of something that might have been inherited. Maybe, as you mentioned before, there’s a tradition of criticality that doesn’t have to be negative per se. Criticism and criticality can be very positive things if the next steps are taken appropriately. But there is something about optimism that is its own engine that helps the seeking of knowledge continue when you don’t know what the frontiers actually look like.

Whereas, if you’re coming at something from a place of pessimism, it’s much harder to rally any kind of troops to go along on the ride with you. Because what are you looking forward to? More dreariness, more end-of-everything-good. And so, I think that there was something at the time of folks saying like, “I don’t want to focus on the past. I don’t want to focus on things that are going to bring me down.”

One thing I’d like to introduce, though, today—and maybe this is because I’m out of my element—but what if we were to look at the past with optimism, like taking in and exhuming these ideas of Peter Drucker rather than saying we have to come up with something new and disruptive as the only way we’d find optimism? What if we find optimism in some of these things that have been buried and forgotten in a paradigm that could be used again? Clearly we’re sitting in a lot of … I’m not going into doom-and-gloom, but there’s a lot of relevance here for the world collapse idea and the creation of the New World and the functioning society needs.

I think those conversations need to come back more than ever because we’re at a point where we have to ask ourselves, “Is this functioning? Are we sure this is functioning?” Call your health insurance company with a complaint or a dispute on a claim and tell me that’s functioning. Because I know I will lose five hours of my life and not get anywhere—and that’s just the banal kind of example. That’s not the big stuff that you could be talking about.

Where are the opportunities for us to exhume some of these ideas that have been buried, especially coming out of this postwar era? And the last bit I want to leave you both with is the coincidence of where transdisciplinarity comes from around the same time. So you have folks who had been looking at … 100 years of having a lot of disciplines together, and that’s great. But it was really around this same time that people started thinking about how to integrate them and create something different. The folks who were integral to some of these early interdisciplinary adventures were funded by the Defense Department in the U.S. to figure out how to create ballistic missiles. It came from a war place.

But a lot of the people working on this were from anthropology and computational sciences before there were really computers, and those were the folks focused on human systems. It was this marrying of the ideas of how humans work together, how machines work together, and how humans can work with machines. And the answer to all of this is that everything boils down to relationships. If we study relationships—and not in this very formal kind of counseling version, or even confined to a field of psychology—and look at everything as relationships, there was the birth of cybernetics and the idea is that everything is a study of relationships.

That’s where you have some of these great thinkers come out, like Gregory Bateson, who tells you that you’re holding up your hand, calling it a singular hand, but actually it’s a series of four relationships and a thumb. Or you look at Margaret Mead, who was his wife, who tells you that the only way that we’ve ever had positive change in this world is from a small group of people working together to make it happen. These are the folks who founded transdisciplinary studies, and these are the folks who also had to work together to create changes in a world that was crumbling. And so I think there’s some nugget that I’m really interested in understanding, of what was going on that created possibly optimism, bravery, a sense of agency, collaboration, seeing in systems, and being able to put together or make sense of or even envision a world that’ll function better than the last. What happened then? Because I think we could use a little bit of it now. And that’s where I’m really interested in … for those of you that know this historical moment, please tell me, I want to know the secrets of creating this kind of world.

BERNIE: Okay, so Andy, let me try and ask a more difficult question than you just asked …

ANDREW: I ask you on this show because … I pay you so handsomely.

BERNIE: Let me riff on an adjacent space, and then head into your area. Drucker had these essays at one point in his career about tribalism and regionalism. The idea was that when society is under stress, the tribes begin to form and tightly coalesce. So, if you think about World War Two in the United States, the Italian community in New York was tightly, tightly integrated, and really, depending upon their community, very aggressive, and not as connected to other communities. So, there’s a tendency to pull back and pull within and go to a cultural area that’s comfortable for you.

And so, under duress … we see this tribalism unfold. So that’s my first observation. The second observation is that in the era coming out of World War Two, he saw the tribes become not as salient. They became more munificent, with more of a sense of, “I’m going to give back.” … As he watched U.S. society, he was always commenting on—and it happened to him—that people were helping others, even though they had no reason to help others. And so, he saw a giving, an open U.S. society, where

He talks about this one job that he had where he was going to interview with … it must have been an immigration officer. I think it was where the immigration officer says, “Hey, you’re, you know, you’re trying to get U.S. citizenship. Well, you know you’re working for—” (I’m making this up) “—$20 a week. If you come to work here at the immigration service, we can pay you $70 a week, and I can get you connected.” Just as an illustration of someone who doesn’t need to, but actually reaches out over the aisle to another tribe to say, “Hey, we can do things here …”

He saw U.S. society really move away from this tribalism and become much more a society of one and of a broader perspective. Now I’m pushing the envelope a little bit. He didn’t use those terms, but he did see the idea that tribes were not as important when society was moving in the right direction. People in that society had a sense of optimism, spirit, belonging, and a broader whole. And therefore, we’re going to pitch in, we’re going to give back, and we’re going to help out in some way, shape, or form. And he loved that period where he would bump into folks and do things, in the late 1940s and early 1950s. That was an interesting observation about U.S. society at that time.

Let’s use those ideas to reflect upon a little bit of what’s going on right now in the world. You could argue that with Brexit, there’s tribalism, and the outside parts of the non-city environments of the U.K., the rural areas, the folks who are a little bit more senior living in rural areas, have a tribal mentality in terms of protecting where they are because they’re under duress. They’re under pressure. It’s not a bad response if you’re under so much pressure that you want to kind of figure out how we get back to where we were. How do we think about this? Do we need to help? Do we need to help others? Maybe we just need to help our community in the sense of nationalism, regionalism, or even within the tribe.

So, you can see that same kind of thinking unfolding today. Unfortunately, the solution that ultimately happened in the earlier years was that there was this meta-goal. We had this in the war that we were fighting. We had to get through that war. And once we got through that meta-goal that had aligned everybody in U.S. society, then all of a sudden, we could see we did not have to be broken into parts. We could actually be much more of a collective. So, the question becomes, is there some force out there that would align people on the same page in some way, shape, or form?

Now, I hate to think about it as war. But, there are a number of issues that potentially could have aligned people, that didn’t. For example, the climate: That seems like a pretty easy one to align every single person around. Apparently, it’s not. Diversity, equity, inclusion: That seems like a pretty obvious one to align people around. It seems so obvious. Who doesn’t want inclusion? Well, apparently that’s controversial. So, some of these meta-societal goals that could be there have turned out not to be and if anything are more politicized and problematic.

But the search for a meta-goal on which everybody can be aligned is an interesting one. And that maybe, where does … unfortunately, it’s become politicized. When you think about where U.S. society needs to go, what does good look like for us? What does a good world look like? Well, that conversation is all of a sudden political. It’s not like we want a world where everybody’s happy, people are content, they can have status, they can function, and they can live out the promise of Western civilization. Apparently, that’s going to be controversial. So, anything we go with becomes a challenge.

But I would say the search for a broad, integrated vision of where we need to be that can align people who are typically in our tribe, as opposed to cross-tribe, would be one way to get to a solution.

ANDREW: Bernie, when you were speaking … there’s a theory that comes out of anthropology that was then adopted by psychology, called the terror management theory. It has nothing to do with terrorism, but it’s the idea that as humans, we all have the capacity to foresee our own demise, and anything that adds to that anxiety in any way takes us back to our more infantile reflexes. And so when you see something that scares you, like you see that there’s a fire a mile from you, you start to close in on what’s most familiar to you and the people closest to you, and you stop caring about things that are one or two removed from you. Your mind really closes in on the proximal and not the distal.

One of the ways that you deal with contemplating your own mortality is by narrowing your idea of what is meaningful in your life and holding really strongly to that because you have more connection and more control over that. It’s a very human thing, according to this theory, to have that. But … if there’s even a story to be written, if the world is full of those stressors, then we end up creating a reinforcing loop in which we become more tribal because of our own human instincts, but we’re also feeding into it with the zeitgeist, with the thought norms of the time.

So, we can encourage fragmentation rather than unity because it’s more intuitive for us to feel the fragmentation. And so then when we start formalizing that fragmentation, and we have classes about fragmentation, and we have podcasts about fragmentation, and we have media about it, then it’s even more embedded in who we are. Maybe then there’s a little bit more wiggle room because at the same time, while we might have this terror management that tries to get us to feel like we have a sense of control over our mortality, each of us also has that spirit of like, “Well, maybe they’re a decent human being, maybe we do have something in common. Maybe I do want to say ‘Hi’ to that person across the street or, you know, walk into that organization that I’ve always wondered what goes on inside those doors because maybe I just would be welcome there.”

And I think that more than anything, we have to think about what’s necessary to get us back in a balance between those kinds of going out on a limb to believe in the possible good, in the outcome, versus the need to protect what we believe is most important to us while we’re dealing with all of the stressors that we have going on at the same time.

A war is like a cheat code because a war gives you an all-or-nothing, and ultimately the consequences are huge for so many people, even the survivors. Clearly, countries are still using war to do this. But if there are other versions of this, I think the world would really benefit from it, and I do hope that we have some thought-gems that we can extract and exhume from some of these other great thinkers who came out of these really trying times so that we can think about how they can be applied to now as well. We really should do this as a transdisciplinary exercise, something that isn’t just kept in a business silo per se or a cultural studies or historical silo because it’s so much bigger than any one of those things, this project whereby people are creating the world, a better world for us to live in, and we need that wisdom.

So, it was a very light conversation today. Thank you both for keeping it jovial and not talking about anything serious. But really, truly, it was wonderful having you both on the show, I would like to continue this conversation. I think there’s a lot here, and I hope maybe we can do something with the Drucker School to have conversations about Drucker and society but take it out of the traditional spaces where that might be held and turn it into something that has a broader-reaching impact.

BERNIE: Well, I think there’s a lot of themes that we could play with here Andy that are not “business.” and are more about the nature of organizational life that most of us live in. And what are some principles of organizations that are run well? How do we think about that? … As long as we reflect on the idea that there’s all forms of organizations, people listening to podcasts from nonprofits, social organizations, government, or family businesses, they can all see the merits of the conversation because the principles are highly relevant across various environments.

So, I’m happy to follow up and have another podcast. It’s been a lot of fun. It’s really fun to interact with Trevor, who’s really going to deep-dive into Peter’s work and thinking. It’s been a lot of fun for me to be part of it.

TREVOR: Yes, thank you, Bernie, and thank you, Andy. It’s been a lot of fun. I agree.

ANDREW: Well, until next time, everyone, thank you so much for joining us today and for a great conversation.

Thanks for listening to this episode of PostNormal Times. Thanks to our guest and thanks to our support from Claremont Graduate University. If you enjoyed boundary crossing with us and want to hear more, make sure you follow us, spread the word, and tune in to our next episode.