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A Man's Spiritual Journey From Kierkegaard to General Motors
When Peter F. Drucker died eight days ago, the only specifically religious reference that appeared in most obituaries was "guru" -- as in "management guru." It was, incidentally, a term he despised.
Many obituaries did mention that for decades Mr. Drucker, who would have turned 96 today, devoted much of his energy to analyzing and advising nonprofit organizations and charities. A few obituaries even mentioned churches.
In fact, Mr. Drucker's prescience about the growing role of megachurches in American society could be placed alongside other insights those obituaries recorded: his anticipation of Japan's economic emergence, for example, or his attention to the rise of "knowledge workers" and the uses of "privatization."
Religion, it turned out, had a great deal to do with Mr. Drucker's work. In 1989, the editors of Leadership, an evangelical quarterly for pastors, asked him, "After a lifetime of studying management, why are you now turning your attention to the church?"
Mr. Drucker politely corrected them. "As far as I'm concerned, it's the other way around," he said. "I became interested in management because of my interest in religion and institutions."
Mr. Drucker was raised in Vienna in a family of intellectuals, the perfect incubator for the polymath he became. Jack Beatty, in his biography "The World According to Peter Drucker" (Free Press, 1998), passes on Mr. Drucker's description of the family Lutheranism as "so 'liberal' that it consisted of little more than a tree at Christmas and Bach cantatas at Easter."
Then, at age 19, Mr. Drucker came across the works of the theologian and philosopher Soren Kierkegaard -- and was bowled over. He studied Danish in order to read Kierkegaard's yet-untranslated writings.
From Kierkegaard to studying General Motors and the secrets of entrepreneurship may seem like a long stretch. But Kierkegaard's stark Christian vision spoke to Mr. Drucker's lifelong search for what he was observing while working in a Germany sliding into Nazism -- an explanation of why, in a modern world of organizations and rapid change, freedom has so often been surrendered.
Mr. Beatty notes the "nakedly religious sentiment" with which Mr. Drucker ended his 1959 book "Landmarks of Tomorrow."
"The individual," Mr. Drucker wrote, "needs the return to spiritual values, for he can survive in the present human situation only by reaffirming that man is not just a biological and psychological being but also a spiritual being, that is creature, and existing for the purposes of his creator and subject to Him."
Such sentiments do not crop up often in the 35 books that Mr. Drucker published. In a 1999 profile in Christianity Today, Tim Stafford described Mr. Drucker as a "practicing Episcopalian." An interview in Forbes exactly a year ago described him as a "muted Episcopalian." (One can almost hear other Episcopalians quipping, "What other kind is there?")
As Mr. Stafford observed, "Drucker hardly ever uses theological or biblical terminology to express himself, even if he is writing about something that easily fits theological categories. With some other management writer this might be an accident, but Drucker is so well educated in philosophy and theology that it has to be a conscious choice. The point is that Drucker is not a man of pious gestures."
So if Mr. Drucker's religious interests were not more widely noticed, it was due to his own reticence as much as to any antipathy to religion in the world of business or ideas. Still, once one becomes aware of his religions as well as his political outlook, it is not hard to see them as underpinnings for much of his thinking about the human obligations of management and the importance of community in an unstable world.
His reticence disappeared, of course, when he was addressing religion and management directly. He tossed out ideas and opinions in his usual dizzying fashion, comparing Reformation-era Calvinists and Jesuits, declaring revolutions "in the human spirit," obviously less concerned about being wrong than about not provoking thought.
The future was with "pastoral churches," he argued, ones that put a higher priority on answering people's needs than perpetuating some specific doctrine or ritual or institutional structure.
"Very bluntly, people are dreadfully bored with theology," he told the editors of Leadership in 1989. "And I sympathize with them. I've always felt that quite clearly the good Lord loves diversity. He created 2,500 species of flies. If he had been like some theologians I know, there would have been only one right specie of fly."
Are pastors comparable to C.E.O.'s? "Up to a point," Mr. Drucker said. On the other hand, "many other organizations can be run on the army model, the command model. But the church cannot. It's a partnership."
Sermons are important. "You have 20 minutes to communicate the vision," he said, the fact "that there is another world, but it completely penetrates, encompasses, encapsulates this world."
Sometimes he criticized churches as being unconcerned about the world. At other times, he criticized them as emphasizing social programs to the neglect of a distinctly spiritual mission.
"The church is the only organization that is not entirely concerned with the kingdom of this earth," he said. "We're the only one with another dimension. And for that reason, many good concerns around here are not our primary focus."
One should not miss the "we" and "our" in those sentences.
He freely admitted inconsistency, however, questioning whether some churches should "really be in the shelter business," but praising Roman Catholics for running schools for non-Catholics in areas where the public schools were wanting. The question was always, he said, "Can we make a real difference?"
"Making a difference in the way people see what's truly important in life" was his ultimate test for both individuals and churches.
"I don't know," he acknowledged, "that you can measure this -- certainly not by the bookkeeping of this world -- but I'm reasonably sure that some sort of bookkeeping is going on someplace."
In this world, he said in a characteristic marriage of the visionary and the practical, the ones who best understand what can make a difference are the saints.
"That's the definition of a saint," Mr. Drucker said, "somebody who sees reality."
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