Peter Drucker: Transdisciplinary Pioneer
Host Andrew Vosko sits down with Bernie Jaworski, the Peter F. Drucker Chair in Management and the Liberal Arts at Claremont Graduate University, and Trevor Anthony, a cultural studies PhD fellow at CGU, to discuss Peter Drucker, one of the 20th century’s great unrecognized transdisciplinarians.
PostNormal Times · Bernie Jaworski, Trevor Anthony, Andrew Vosko, Peter Drucker
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Show Notes
0:00: Andrew welcomes guests Bernie Jaworski, who’s the Peter F. Drucker Chair in Management and the Liberal Arts, and Trevor Anthony, who’s a cultural studies PhD fellow.
3:10: Andrew introduces the episode’s thesis: Peter Drucker—generally considered the father of management—is one of the 20th century’s great unrecognized transdisciplinarians.
4:37: Bernie discusses his professional journey, including 15 years as a traditional academic as a tenured professor at the University of Southern California, 10 years as a management consultant with the Monitor Group, and then 13 years in his current position as the Drucker Chair.
8:45: Bernie describes a cornerstone of Drucker’s vision and work: the role of organizations in the functioning society.
11:30: Trevor adds commentary on Drucker’s background and how his experience of the collapse of the Old World in Europe as a youth left him with a respect for results. He connects and contrasts what he calls Drucker’s “constructive” vision with the popular “critical” tradition of the humanities and specifically of cultural studies.
15:35: Following Andrew’s notion of the challenges and opportunities of world collapse, Bernie describes Drucker’s revolutionary contributions to topics such as values, mission, purpose, and ethics in the realm of business in the 1950s—and thus why Drucker considered management a liberal art.
22:00: Andrew prompts a discussion of Drucker’s self-description as a “social ecologist.”
30:00: Andrew, Bernie, and Trevor discuss the essential optimism embedded in Drucker’s work, the practice of management, and transdisciplinary work in general.