In May 2006, more than 100 leading Drucker-like thinkers and practitioners gathered in Claremont, Calif., to help answer one question: What is Peter Drucker’s legacy?
Attendees included Jim Collins, best-selling author of Good to Great and Built to Last; Paul H. O’Neill, former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury and former chairman of Alcoa; A.G. Lafley, chairman and CEO of Procter & Gamble; Nobuhiro Iijima, CEO of the multi-billion dollar Yamazaki Baking Co.; and Masatoshi Ito, the founder and honorary chairman of the Ito-Yokado Group, Asia’s largest retail chain.
This distinguished group’s answer to the question was that Drucker’s legacy amounts to much more than memories of the man or even his writing. Drucker’s legacy, they said, is a collection of ideas and ideals that should be acted upon by future generations of leaders responsible for the companies and communities in which we work and live.
In response, the Board of Advisors of the Peter F. Drucker Archives (founded in 1998) and the Drucker family took a crucial step in 2006: They decided the best way to keep Drucker’s legacy alive was not simply to look backward (through old manuscripts and other documents) but to look forward (by building on Drucker’s wisdom and applying it to important contemporary issues).
Their mandate, in other words, was to transform the archival repository into a think tank and an action tank whose purpose is to better society by stimulating effective management and responsible leadership. Out of the Drucker Archives thus grew the Drucker Institute. We are a campus-wide resource of Claremont Graduate University that is closely aligned with the Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management, where Drucker taught for 35 years.
