Drucker: No, I would be much happier if kids at age 17 were young
adults among adults. Those who wanted to go back to school could come
back later. They would be better students and much happier people. But I
don't control the universe. In the university we expect everybody to sit
on his butt through the full natural life-span of man-which is about 25.
All I can say is, Thank God I am not young. I could not survive this
horror. The only thing my secondary school faculty and I were in total
agreement on was that I sat too long and did not belong in school. In
this we were in total agreement. Otherwise, we had few points of contact.
Adolescence is a man made problem. It is not a stage of nature.
Graduate school is not focused on forming a human being but on
imparting a finer set of skills. The purpose is not education, but
specialization. I am a doer, not a contemplator; a perceiver, not a
thinker. I am one of those who has to listen to himself to know what he
is thinking or saying all the time. These are all very undesirable
characteristics, so I am not at all the type that graduate schools look
for.
PT: Did you go from the university into management consultant work,
or was it the other way around?
Drucker: I have always taught on the side, because I like to teach.
I started teaching at 20 when I was in law school out of sheer boredom.
It was the only way to stay alive.
After I finished secondary school, I went to work in England as an
apprentice clerk in a woolen-export house. I was the first person to
start apprenticeship as late as 18. All my bosses' sons started at 14.
And I was the first who did not live over the premises-solely because a
fire had destroyed the premises. And I was the first not to start off
with a goose-quill pen. That was the year they discovered they couldn't
buy goose-quill pens anymore.
PT: That sounds like something out of Charles Dickens. How did you
get there?
Drucker: Well, I grew up in Vienna, but my family always had very
close ties with England. By the way, the only connection I can claim with
psychology is that my family knew Freud. My father knew him from boyhood
and put him on a pedestal as a genius who could do no wrong. My mother's
reaction was quite different. When she was a young student, she was one
of Freud's favorites. (She was one of the first women to go to medical
school. She had to go to Zurich to do it.) She understood why he was
important but she refused to have anything to do with him.
PT: Why couldn't she stand Freud?
Drucker: She felt that he was an evil man. She was a perceptive
person. My father saw this man as a genius, and felt that geniuses should
be allowed anything.
PT: Why did your mother feel that Freud was an evil man?
Drucker: Because he was, period. He was a man who had to
domineer.
PT: Let's get back to your own life. Where did you go from your
apprenticeship in the export business?
Drucker: I went to Germany. I went into investment banking. In
1929, as you may have heard, there was a slight unpleasantness.
Investment banking came to an end, and I became a newspaperman. But all
the time, I was enrolled as a law student.
PT: I didn't know you were a journalist.
Drucker: In a way I have never ceased being one. But for two
periods in my life this was my main occupation. For a few years in the
late '20s and early '30s when I worked on the Continent primarily as one
of the editors of a German daily paper and then in the late '30s when I
first came to the United States as American correspondent for a group of
British papers. But I have really been writing all my life, and it is the
only thing I claim any skill in. And in between my newspaper jobs, for
four years right after the Nazis came to power, I was in London as an
investment banker and economist.
PT: You did quite a few things as a young man.
Drucker: Yes, until I was 30 I was really a drifter. I knew
perfectly well all the things I didn't want to do with myself. In
retrospect, I realize that I must have been a very sorry specimen and I
do marvel at my parents' patience with me. It was not until I came to
this country that I realized what I wanted.
PT: But you were very successful in that interim period.
Drucker: I looked successful, but I wasn't. This is why I have such
sympathy with today's young people. What saved me, they don't have. I had
to have a job to pay the rent. And they, instead, have Uncle Sam with a
graduate grant, which makes finding yourself a good deal harder than hard
times did for my generation.
PT: You came to the United States before the Second World
War?
Drucker: Yes. In April, 1937. Here I also taught on the side. I
taught philosophy at Bennington college in Vermont, then I came here to
New York University. I am not a proper model for anything.
PT: When did you switch entirely to management consulting?
Drucker: I haven't. I am tired of management books.
PT: You may be tired of management books, but our readers want to
know more about careers. Young people want to know how to find their
particular round hole, or square-depending on their shape. You said the
young person looking for a career should figure: "Do I fit into the large
corporation?" or "Should I be on my own?" But what is the opportunity for
being on one's own? Isn't the large corporation most likely.?
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