Cherish This Encounter, for It Will Not Come Again

Source: mast3r/Shutterstock

Sometimes you can wait too long to ask for opportunities and connections. Just because a person could potentially live to an advanced age does not mean they are always going to be available for you to interact with.

I have been fortunate. In researching my first book, Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life, published in 2009, nearly four years after Drucker’s death at 95, I was able to interview many leaders who had worked with Drucker over the years and whose perspectives were invaluable to understanding the magnitude of his work and his ongoing impact..

Like Drucker himself, some achieved impressive longevity. Charles Handy only recently died at age 92. Drucker’s wife, Doris Drucker, an author and late-in-life entrepreneur, died at 103, in 2014. Frances Hesselbein, former CEO of Girl Scouts of the USA, where she worked closely with Drucker in his consulting role, and who co-founded the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management (now the Frances Hesselbein Leadership Forum), died at 107 in 2022. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, psychologist and author of Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience and a former professor at the Drucker School of Management, died at 87 in 2021.

As sources of information, they were generous with their time. Some opened further avenues of research and study for me to pursue. All taught me much not only about the subject of my book but about the art of interacting itself.

Five Observations on Interpersonal Interactions

From the many conversations I've had with these experts and many more, five observations regarding interpersonal interactions stand out.

1. Take advantage of opportunities when you can.
2. Appreciate people while they are still alive.
3. Stay in touch with, and be available to help others.
4. Learn directly from people while you have the opportunity.
5. "Cherish this encounter, for it will not come again."

The latter comes from a Japanese term, Ichi-go ichi-e, which I learned from another interviewee, Drucker School professor and founding director of the Executive Mind Leadership Institute Jeremy Hunter, who worked closely with Csikszentmihalyi—and is still very much alive!).

Important as interpersonal encounters can be, they can also be fleeting. Some can even be one-time interactions. We may or may not know the person well. Sometimes the encounter may require a display of gratitude on our part. The encounters can grow in importance long after the fact. We may wish we could remember more of what was said, or how we were feeling at the moment. We may ask, in retrospect, whether we gave the other person our full attention.

What if we treated every encounter with a person as potentially our last?

Had I known which Drucker-world encounters would be the final ones, we would probably have been more mindful and attentive. It's important to try to make the most of each moment.

Giving and Receiving Generosity

In our interactions, we can both acknowledge generosity from others, and display generosity with our time, talents, and expertise. Sometimes this can involve mentoring, offering advice, providing another point of view, or casting a different set of eyes on a situation.

Drucker was a terrific role model for this form of generosity. The demands on his time were unrelenting. He had uncountable offers for lecturing, consulting, writing, presenting, and related activities. Despite all the demands, he spent considerable time connecting with his former students—including helping them find jobs—and doing pro bono work for nonprofits, especially including Girl Scouts of the USA.

“What Do You Want to Be Remembered for?”

Joseph A. Maciariello, a Drucker School professor was one of Peter Drucker’s closest collaborators He died at 78 in 2020. He was the first person I interviewed for my book and remained generous with his time in the following years. In his own book A Year with Peter Drucker: 52 Weeks of Coaching for Leadership Effectiveness, he references one of Drucker’s signature questions: “What do you want to be remembered for?” Maciariello concludes the following: “We have seen that if we, like Peter Drucker, take an eternal view, only people last. Therefore, it is what we do in and for the lives of people that is most likely to outlive us.”