Peter Drucker and the Power of Teaching

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Peter Drucker is primarily known as the father of modern management, who consulted for some of the world’s most important organizations and wrote management books that sold millions of copies.

However, teaching was one of Drucker’s most cherished activities. He loved it because it was one of the primary ways he learned and also because he wanted to help guide his students to have fulfilling, meaningful careers and to have a positive influence on society.

He believed that teaching was important in organizations beyond formal classrooms or traditional places of learning. In his 1990 book Managing the Non-Profit Organization: Principles and Practices, he claims that “the most important way to develop people is to use them as teachers. Nobody learns as much as a good teacher.”

Drucker had the distinction of teaching at a school named for him. He taught at what eventually became known as the Drucker School of Management, at Claremont Graduate University, in Claremont, California, from 1971 until his death at the age of 95 in 2005. This followed 21 years of teaching management at New York University/NYU.

Prior to that, from 1939-1942, he taught Freshman English, economics, and statistics part-time at Sarah Lawrence College, near New York City; and for the rest of the decade taught politics and American history, government, and religion at Bennington College in Vermont, his first full time teaching post after emigrating to the United States.

His longtime interest in (and collecting of) Japanese art also found expression in teaching. In the early 1980s, he taught a course on Japanese art at Pomona College, part of the Claremont Colleges.

“The Teacher” is a chapter from Drucker: A Life in Pictures, a 2013 book by Rick Wartzman, former executive director of the Drucker Institute. It draws on materials from the institute’s Drucker Archives and depicts a letter to the editor to The Economist, one of Drucker’s favorite publications, and for which he also wrote. Explaining his move from NYU, he writes that “Claremont also offered a fellow about to be condemned to idleness a new beginning as an educational innovator and entrepreneur: to start and build a management school based on my principles.”

Of the people I interviewed for my two Drucker-related books, some of the most passionate were his former students. He learned from and drew insights from what was new and important in their lives. This was especially true for those in his Executive Management Program, who already held managerial positions in their organizations. Drucker maintained relationships with many of his students long after they graduated, phoning them periodically to inquire about their current life and work, and to see how useful his teachings had been.

He attended many events on the Claremont campus, including the annual Founder’s Day in his honor (changed to Drucker Day after his death). As Drucker’s friend and collaborator, the late T. George Harris, noted in Harvard Business Review in 1993, “Yet he learns most from in-depth conversations with clients and students: a global network of men and women who draw their ideas from action and act on ideas.”

William A. Cohen, a West Point graduate who went on to careers in the military and business, wrote about his experience as Drucker’s first Ph.D. student at Claremont in the 1970s in the 2007 book A Class With Drucker: The Lost Lessons of the World’s Greatest Management Teacher. He followed that with a number of other Drucker-related books, such as The Practical Drucker and Drucker on Leadership. Cohen, who counted Drucker as a mentor, later founded California Institute of Advanced Management (CIAM), a private nonprofit university partly dedicated to Drucker’s principles.

One of Drucker’s students at NYU, the late John E. Flaherty, author of Peter Drucker: Shaping the Managerial Mind, became Dean of the business school at Pace University in New York. When I interviewed him for USA TODAY after the book’s publication in 1999, he explained that, beginning in the 1950s, he audited a number of Drucker’s courses, and Drucker became a mentor. Flaherty noted that “the vast majority of Drucker's students worked full time and took courses in the evening. He respected their personal commitments, family sacrifices and the maturity brought to the classroom."

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Perhaps Drucker’s most famous student was Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011), at Bennington, who treasured his career advice. She became one of the country’s most important artists, winning major awards over a six-decade career, with her work displayed in museums worldwide.

In his 1978 memoir Adventures of a Bystander, Drucker writes about teaching in the chapter “Miss Elsa and Miss Sophy,” named after his fourth-grade teachers in Vienna, Austria. He relates his enjoyment of “teacher watching,” a practice he long maintained, and his observations about famous faculty colleagues at Bennington, such as the dancer-choreographer Martha Graham and the psychologist-author Erich Fromm (The Art of Loving).

He continued to learn from his fellow teachers throughout his life, particularly Joseph A. Maciariello, his longtime Drucker School colleague. Maciariello, who died in 2020, collaborated with Drucker on his last several books, and also wrote two books about him.

In Management: Revised Edition, published in 2008, three years after his death, Drucker captured how teaching finds expression in the ‘real world’: “In fact, finding the student’s strengths and focusing them on achievement is the best definition of the goal of teaching.”