Prophet sharing

by Mark Williams

Peter Drucker is 90. For six decades, he has advised the heads of corporations and governments. He is modest about it all, remembering legendary figures like -->IBM (NYSE : IBM)'s founder Thomas J. Watson Sr. as friends. Once, after he told us something remarkable, we asked whether some historian we might read could tell us more. "No," he responded in his measured, gravelly, Viennese-accented tones, "I am the single survivor of that commission of Mr. Eisenhower's." What he had told us was that a project to establish universal health care had been suggested in the '50s, but the United Auto Workers union had blocked it. When contacted, UAW officials groused that Mr. Drucker was an "exalted curmudgeon," yet didn't deny his claim outright.
Mr. Drucker lives in a middle-class home in Claremont, a Los Angeles suburb, donating much of the money from his books, lectures, and consulting to charity. Wearing a blue blazer, sharply pressed trousers, and a red tie, he ushered us in when we rang. Nowadays he leans on a cane to get around. Still, he maintains a vigorous pace: writing, teaching five days a week at Claremont Graduate University, and preparing online management courses for Corpedia Training Technologies.
Privatization, outsourcing, management theory, knowledge workers, and the knowledge economy are concepts Mr. Drucker originated. They've changed both the past and the present. But while ranging over a variety of topics -- from Bill Gates's disgruntled ex-employees to Franz Kafka inventing the safety helmet -- we knew that Mr. Drucker had been thinking hard about the future: the world beyond the information revolution. We steered him toward that. His answers, we believe, will startle you.

You think he was a great writer, don't you? But Franz Kafka invented the safety helmet. He was the great man in factory inspection and workman's compensation. Kafka was the workman's compensation-factory safety man for what's now the Czech Republic, which was Bohemia and Moravia before World War I. Our next-door neighbor was the top workman's compensation-factory safety man for Austria. Kafka was his idol. When Kafka [was dying] outside of Vienna of throat tuberculosis, Dr. Kuiper -- our neighbor -- pedaled on his bike at 5 each morning for two hours to visit the dying Kafka, then took the train to work. After Kafka's death, nobody was more surprised than Dr. Kuiper to discover he'd been a writer. Kafka got the gold medal of, I think, the American Safety Congress for 1912 because as a result of his safety helmet, the steel mills in what is [now] the Czech Republic for the first time killed fewer than 25 workers per 1,000 a year.


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