Adventure of a Bystander
by Peter Drucker
Bibliography for many of Drucker's books
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An amazing pageant of characters, both famous and otherwise, springs from these pages, illuminating and defining one of the most tumultuous periods in world history.
Along with bankers and courtesans, artists, aristocrats, prophets, and empire-builders, we meet members of Drucker's own family and close circle of friends, among them such prominent figures as Sigmund Freud, Henry Luce, Alfred Sloan, John Lewis, and Buckminster Fuller.
Playing to perfection their roles as those who "reflect and refract" the customs, beliefs, and attitudes of the times, these singular personalities lend Adventures of a Bystander a striking "you-are-there" feel.
I laughed and I cried as I read Adventures of a Bystander.
I have always had enormous respect for Professor Drucker, but this book has taken my respect and awe of him to another plateau.
To learn how and what Professor Drucker thought as a child and how many momentous decisions he made by the time he was fourteen helps us understand him as a person and the environment from which all of his other works come.
My grandmother also grew up in Austria and the "Grandmother stories" brought back very precious memories.
Once again, even as a youngster, we see Professor Drucker uncannily knowing what will happen by studying (by living) the events of the times.
One cannot really understand and appreciate Professor Drucker and his other works without reading this book, and yet, reading many of his other works first, made me appreciate Adventures of a Bystander even more.
Contents of Adventures of a Bystander
Preface to the New Edition
Prologue: A Bystander Is Born
Report From Atlantis
 Grandmother And The Twentieth Century
Hemme And Genia
Miss Elsa And Miss Sophy (great teachers)
Freudian Myths And Freudian Realities
Count Traun-Trauneck And The Actress Maria Mueller
Young Man In An Old World
The Polanyis
The Man Who Invented Kissinger
The Monster And The Lamb
Noel Brailsford—The Last Of The Dissenters
Ernest Freeberg's World
The Bankers And The Courtesan
The Indian Summer Of Innocence
Henry Luce And Time-Life-Fortune
The Prophets: Buckminster Fuller And Marshall McLuhan
The Professional: Alfred Sloan (My Years with General Motors)
The Indian Summer Of Innocence
See What do you want to be remembered for?
Preface to the New Edition
I taught religion (see The Unfashionable Kierkegaard and The Happiness Purpose) once, many years ago, and I greatly enjoyed it.
But I never had much use for theology.
There are, I am told, some thirty-five thousand different species of flies.
But if the theologians had their way, there would be only one, the right Fly.
The Creator glories in diversity.
And no species is more diverse than those two-legged creatures, Men and Women.
(See mental patterns for an explanation of this diversity.)
Even as a small child I marvelled at their diversity.
And I have never met a single uninteresting person.
No matter how conformist, how conventional, or how dull, people become fascinating the moment they talk of the things they do, know, or are interested in.
Everyone then becomes an individual.
The most conventional person I can recall, a banker in a small New England town, who seemed to know nothing but the most hackneyed clichés, became fascinating when he suddenly started talking about buttons throughout the ages—their invention, their shapes, their materials, their functions and uses—with a fire and passion worthy of a great lyrical poet.
The subject did not interest me much; the man did.
He had become an individual.
And individuals in their diversity are portrayed in this book.
It is this belief in diversity and pluralism and in the uniqueness of each person that underlies all my writings, beginning with my first book more than fifty years ago.
During most of these fifty years centralization, uniformity, and conformity were dominant.
The totalitarian regimes (The End of Economic Man) in which everybody was to conform, to think the same, to write and paint the same, to be centrally controlled—the Nazis called it "switched onto the same track" (gleichgeschaltet)—were but the head of a universal current.
It swept over the democracies as well.
But every one of my books and essays, whether dealing with politics, philosophy, or history; with social order and social institutions; with management, technology, or economics, has stressed pluralism and diversity.
Where the prevailing doctrines preached control by big government or big business, I stressed decentralization, experimentation, and the need to create community.
And where the prevailing approaches saw government and big business as the only institutions and as the "countervailing powers" of a modern society, I stressed the importance and central role of the non-profit, public-service institutions, the "third sector"—as the nurseries of independence and diversity; as guardians of values; as providers of community leadership and citizenship.
And I pointed out how much of society is organized and informed by non-business, non-governmental institutions, the universities, for instance, or the hospitals, each with very different values and a different personality.
But I was swimming against a strong current.
Now, at last, the tide has turned, and it has turned my way.
The flag-bearer of the collectivist, centralizing, uniformity-imposing parade, Communism, has proven a sham, incompetent even to provide the mere rudiments of effective government, functioning economy, citizenship, and community.
And in the West too we are now rapidly decentralizing, indeed uncentralizing.
For a generation after World War II, we believed that any sickness was best treated in a centralized hospital, the bigger the better.
We are now moving patients into "outreach" facilities as fast as we can.
During the last fifteen years America's large corporations have been shrinking steadily.
All the phenomenal employment growth in this period—the fastest growth in jobs in peacetime history anywhere—has been in small and middle-sized enterprises.
In the decades following World War II, America built ever-bigger consolidated schools—one cause, I believe, of our educational malaise.
Now we are moving towards diverse, decentralized schools, the "magnet schools," for instance.
(See chapter 14, "The Accountable School" in Management, Revised Edition)
"Small is beautiful" is, of course, as much stifling dogma as "big is best"—and equally stupid, as one look at the diversity of God's creation will show.
We surely will not return to the nineteenth-century society, which knew only the smallest and weakest of governments and few institutions except the local church and school.
The knowledge society into which we are moving so fast is going to be a society of organizations.
But of organizations—plural—that will be diverse, decentralized, multiform.
And within these organizations, we are moving away from the standardized, uniform structures that were generally accepted in public administration and business management, "the one right structure for the typical manufacturing company," for instance, or the "model government agency."
We are moving toward organic design, informed by mission, purpose, strategy, and the environment, both social and physical—the design I began to advocate forty years ago in The Practice of Management (which came out in 1954). …
Sidebar: … to pursue the preceding line of thought see Management's New Paradigm
… the center of a modern society, economy and community is not technology.
It is not information.
It is not productivity.
The center of modern society is the managed institution.
The managed institution is society's way of getting things done these days.
And management is the specific tool, the specific function, the specific instrument, to make institutions capable of producing results.
The institution, in short, does not simply exist within and react to society.
It exists to produce results on and in society.
… and Management, Revised Edition which contains a similarly named chapter with a different "landscape" a.k.a. "brainscape." Management Cases (Revised Edition) provides a more day-to-day, issue-to-issue "landscape" view.
… But while my writings for fifty years have been stressing organic design, decentralization, and diversity, they deal with ideas, that is, with abstractions.
They draw heavily on my work with people as a teacher and as a consultant.
And I always try to bring in people to exemplify and to illustrate.
But still, these individuals are being used to exemplify and to illustrate concepts.
I myself have always been more interested in people than in concepts.
But I have known all along that as a writer I do better with concepts than with people.
Adventures of a Bystander is thus a book I wrote for myself.
It is a book about people.
Not about myself; the subtitle of the British edition describes my intention: Other Lives and My Times.
No book of mine has had a longer gestation period; for twenty years I lived with the characters in my head, ate, drank, walked, talked with them, awake and in my dreams.
But no book of mine has come into the world faster—it took less than a year to complete once I sat down at the typewriter.
It is surely not my "most important" book.
But it is the one I enjoy the most.
And so apparently do my readers.
That the book has had success—more than enough to justify reissuing it in this new edition—is, of course, gratifying in itself.
But what is even nicer are the readers who write or who tell me when I encounter them in a meeting: "I have read many of your books, have learned a great deal from them, and use them constantly in my work.
(A possible methodology)
But of all your books I enjoy most Adventures of a Bystander."
And then they often add: "I enjoy it so much because the people in it are so diverse."
I chose the people in this book because of their diversity and because I enjoyed their stories the most.
But as an early reviewer pointed out, they also "signify."
They were not picked because they were "great and famous."
Indeed, most of them were totally obscure; the telephone directory was the only "reference book" ever to list them.
What holds them together is pure chance: they crossed my path.
But still, I think, their individual tales create a tapestry.
In a subjective, eclectic way, they convey, I hope, something of the atmosphere, the ambience, of a time that is rapidly fading—even in the recollection of older people: that very peculiar half-century between pre-World War I Europe and post-World War II America.
Each story is separate.
Each was picked because it made a good story.
But together, I believe, they show that history is, after all, composed of stories.
Memorial Day, 1990 Claremont, California
Prologue: A Bystander Is Born
Bystanders have no history of their own.
They are on the stage but are not part of the action.
They are not even audience.
The fortunes of the play and of every actor in it depend on the audience whereas the reaction of the bystander has no effect except on himself.
But standing in the wings—much like the fireman in the theater—the bystander sees things neither actor nor audience notices.
Above all, he sees differently from the way actors or audience see.
Bystanders reflect—and reflection is a prism rather than a mirror; it refracts.
This book is no more a "history of our times," or even of "my times," than it is an autobiography.
It uses the sequence of my life mainly for the order of appearance of its dramatis personae.
It is not a "personal" book; my experiences, my life, and my work are the book's accompaniment rather than its theme.
But it is an intensely subjective book, the way a first-rate photograph tries to be.
It deals with people and events that have struck me—and still strike me—as worth recording, worth thinking about, worth rethinking and reflecting on, people and events that I had to fit into the pattern of my own experience and into my own fragmentary vision of the world around me and the world inside me.
I was still a week shy of my fourteenth birthday when I discovered myself to be a bystander.
The day was November 11, 1923—my birthday is on the nineteenth.
November 11 in the Austria of my childhood was "Republic Day," commemorating the day, in 1918, on which the last of the Habsburg emperors had abdicated and the Republic was proclaimed.
For most of Austria this was a day of solemnity, if not of mourning—the day of final defeat in a nightmare war, the day in which centuries of history had crumbled into dust. …
… If you decide to read the book, be sure to identify the key people and events in each chapter: "people and events that have struck me—and still strike me—as worth recording, worth thinking about, worth rethinking and reflecting on."
Then you might consider what these ideas mean for you in each of your life roles, what action is needed …
Also see Drucker's "My Life as a Knowledge Worker" and The Management Revolution
From the chapter: "The Monster and the Lamb"
In the days of Hitler Germany's collapse, a short item on an inside page of The New York Times caught my eye: It ran somewhat as follows:
Reinhold Hensch, one of the most wanted Nazi war criminals, committed suicide when captured by American troops in the cellar of a bombed-out house in Frankfurt.
Hensch, who was deputy head of the Nazi SS with the rank of Lieutenant General, commanded the infamous annihilation troops and was in charge of the extermination campaign against Jews and other "enemies of the Nazi state," of killing off the mentally and physically defective in Germany, and of stamping out resistance movements in occupied countries.
He was so cruel, ferocious, and bloodthirsty that he was known as "The Monster" (Das Ungeheuer) even to his own men.
It was the first time since I had left Germany in the winter of 1933 that I had heard or seen Hensch's name.
But I had thought of him often.
For I had spent my last evening in Germany in the company of "The Monster."
… snip, snip …
The new Nazi commissar wasted no time on the amenities.
He immediately announced that Jews would be forbidden to enter university premises and would be dismissed without salary on March 15.
This was something no one had thought possible despite the Nazis' loud anti-Semitism.
Then he launched into a tirade of abuse, filth, and four-letter words such as had rarely been heard even in the barracks and never before in academia.
It was nothing but "shit" and "fuck" and "screw yourself"—words the assembled scholars undoubtedly knew but had certainly never heard applied to themselves.
Next the new boss pointed his finger at one department chairman after another and said:
"You either do what I tell you or we'll put you into a concentration camp."
There was dead silence when he finished; everybody waited for the distinguished biochemist.
The great liberal got up, cleared his throat, and said:
"Very interesting, Mr. Commissar, and in some respects very illuminating.
But one point I didn't get too clearly.
Will there be more money for research in physiology?"
The meeting broke up shortly thereafter with the commissar assuring the scholars that indeed there would be plenty of money for "racially pure science."
A few of the professors had the courage to walk out with their Jewish colleagues; most kept a safe distance from these men who, only a few hours earlier, had been their close friends.
I went out sick unto death—and I knew that I would leave Germany within forty-eight hours.
… snip, snip …
Don't you understand that I (Hensch) want power and money and to be somebody?
That's why I joined the Nazis early on, four or five years ago when they first got rolling.
And now I have a party membership card with a very low number and I am going to be somebody!
The clever, well-born, well-connected people will be too fastidious, or not flexible enough, or not willing to do the dirty work.
That's when I'll come into my own.
Mark my word, you'll hear about me now."
… snip, snip …
And when after two years the Berliner Tageblatt and Schaeffer (The Lamb) had outlived their usefulness, both were liquidated and disappeared without a trace.
In her book on Eichmann, the Nazi mass murderer, the late German-American philosopher Hannah Arendt speaks of "the banality of evil."
This is a most unfortunate phrase.
Evil is never banal.
Evil-doers often are.
Miss Arendt let herself be trapped by the romantic illusion of the "great sinner."
But there are a great many Iagos, trivial men of great evil, and very few Lady Macbeths.
Evil works through the Hensches and the Schaeffers precisely because evil is monstrous and men are trivial.
Popular usage is more nearly right than Miss Arendt was when it calls Satan "Prince of Darkness"; the Lord's Prayer knows how small man is and how weak, when it asks the Lord not to lead us into temptation but to deliver us from evil.
And because evil is never banal and men so often are, men must not treat with evil on any terms—for the terms are always the terms of evil and never those of man.
Man becomes the instrument of evil when, like the Hensches, he thinks to harness evil to his ambition; and he becomes the instrument of evil when, like the Schaeffers, he joins with evil to prevent worse.
I have often wondered which of these two did, in the end, more harm—the Monster or the Lamb; and which is worse, Hensch's sin of the lust for power or Schaeffer's hubris and sin of pride?
But maybe the greatest sin is neither of these two ancient ones; the greatest sin may be the new twentieth-century sin of indifference, the sin of the distinguished biochemist who neither kills nor lies but refuses to bear witness when, in the words of the old gospel hymn, "They crucify my Lord."
Buckminster Fuller Visions
Peter Drucker: Conceptual Resources
about Peter Drucker — a political social ecologist
Combined outline of Drucker's books — useful for topic searching.
Process: find topic; get Kindle version; word search; dictate notes to voice recognition software (Dragon NS or smart phone); calendarize
Invent Radium or I'll Pull Your Hair by Doris Drucker
Most of the following contain interesting introductions and prefaces with key strategic concepts. Reading through a book's index is a valuable use of time.
Toward tomorrows
Toward unimagined futures
The End of Economic Man: The Origins of Totalitarianism (1939)
The Future of Industrial Man (1943)
The New Society: The Anatomy of Industrial Order (1950)
Landmarks of Tomorrow (1957)
The Age of Discontinuity (1968)
The New Realities (1988)
Post-Capitalist Society (1993)
Managing in the Next Society (2002); Last section originally published earlier in The Economist (http://economist.com/surveys/displaystory.cfm?story_id=770819)
Comprehensive Management Books
Concept of the Corporation
Practice of Management
Managing for Results
Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices
Innovation and Entrepreneurship
The Essential Drucker (An introduction to management)
Managing the Non-Profit Organization
Management, Revised Edition
Management Cases (Revised Edition)
The Five Most Important Questions You Will Ever Ask About Your Organization
“Time Related” Management Books
Managing in Turbulent Times
The Changing World of The Executive
Frontiers of Management
Managing for the Future
Managing in a Time of Great Change
Management Challenges for the 21st Century
Managing in the Next Society
Individually Aimed Books by Drucker
Managing Oneself
The Effective Executive
The Effective Executive in Action
What Executives Should Remember (a valuable summary of several core concepts)
The Daily Drucker (an introduction to broad range of his thoughts)
The Daily Drucker table of contents worksheet
Drucker on Asia — A Dialogue Between Peter Drucker and Isao Nakauchi
Adventures of a Bystander
Books about Drucker and his ideas
The Definitive Drucker
Inside Drucker's Brain
A Class With Drucker: The Lost Lessons of the World's Greatest Management Teacher
Drucker on Leadership: New Lessons from the Father of Modern Management
The Drucker Lectures: Essential Lessons on Management, Society, and Economy
The Drucker Difference
Drucker Essay Collections
Although written years ago, these essays can be valuable attention directing tools. They can take your brain to places (brain addresses and brain roads) it wouldn't naturally go. What has changed and what is likely to change?
Technology, Management and Society
Men, Ideas & Politics
Toward the Next Economics and Other Essays
The Ecological Vision: Reflections on the American Condition
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for topics or phrases.