November 16, 2005

Paul B. Brown on Peter Drucker

I was 25 and working as a feature writer for the Newark, N.J. newspaper, The Star-Ledger, when I was hired by Forbes.

That was the good news.

The bad news was I didn’t know the first thing about business. So I bought the technical books—everything from how to read a balance sheet, to what the 100 day moving average was suppose to tell us about where the stock market was headed. I got the gist fairly quickly, but they didn’t teach me much about how to think about business.

“Read Drucker,� the guy across the hall—a man who had business journalism awards named after him—told me, when I expressed my confusion.

And so I did.

What I found was that Drucker had a way of making both neophytes like me, and geniuses like Jack Welch (a Drucker disciple) truly understand how to get to the heart of any business issue by asking simple questions and delivering universal truths:

  • What business are you really in?

  • If you weren’t already in your business, would you enter it today?

  • What gets measured gets done.

Some 20 years after I started at Forbes, I had the chance to interview Drucker for a book—Lessons from the Top—that I was helping to write.

One of the questions we asked was, what are you most proud of.

"A few people for whom I made a difference."

The number was far from few.

--
Written By:
Paul B. Brown
Author of numerous business books including
Customers for Life: How to Turn That One-Time Buyer Into a Lifetime Customer.

Posted by Kate at November 16, 2005 3:37 PM
Comments

What a nice piece Paul--say, you read and review more business books than the ordinary bear. If you were to recommend your top Drucker book or two or three, what would you select?

Posted by: Tom Ehrenfeld at November 16, 2005 4:05 PM
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