ON THE PASSING OF PETER DRUCKER
(January/February 2006 Issue)

Peter Drucker, my great friend and guide of these past thirty years, has gone. His ninety-five year old body finally has "given up the ghost" at 7:20 AM last Friday in his home surrounded by loved ones. Doris Drucker told me his last days were consumed with repeating the Lord's Prayer in German. She said, "I haven't heard that in 80 years." What to say of a soul so great? Perhaps the best phrase or at least the one that echoes most for me is from one of his two novels. If I built a memorial, this is what it would say:

"His life was too short to finish the edifice, but long enough to lay the universe a new foundation."

When I think of Peter as I have done much lately, I think not so much of that which is gone but that of him that remains. When I last saw Peter at his home in Claremont on September 29, 2005, I could tell that the life was ebbing out of him. Doris, his 24/7 faithful wife, sat with us and said afterwards, "This time he's not coming back." I spoke to Peter of his legacy. Wise as always, Peter said, "I am a writer. My legacy is my writing." What a legacy: over 10,000 book pages and countless articles!

I've been much taken up with poetry lately. I read a great poem and "talk back" by writing my own thoughts triggered by the poem in the margin. Not long ago in a quiet weekend morning at Still Point Farm, I found myself with a poem by W. H. Auden that made me think of Peter, our much treasured relationship and his legacy. The poem is Auden's tribute to W.B. Yeats and the bolded words are my marginal notes as I thought of Peter. This is a poem about what survives of a great person after the shell which his spirit occupies for a season is gone.

In Memory of W.B. Yeats By W.H. Auden

He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
O all the instruments agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.
Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

Makes me think of Peter Drucker, his life now consumed with medical attention trying, against nature, and really, I expect against his will, to keep the last shadow of "himself" alive. What was, the crisp hard analytical edge of his observation cannot be preserved except in his writing which remains just as it was recorded in print.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed: he became his admirers.

What remains and probably grows over time if stewarded is the "results and performance" of his body of thought as manifested in the actions of his admirers. All that survives is that which is alive in us. Lived out as ours. No longer "his."

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections;
There's no controlling who will use Peter's legacy and for what purposes.
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

The gift has been received and transformed. And if the gift is indeed giving; if there is a desire to pass it on, then it is a gift that survives multiple passings -- without attribution. I have long since ceased knowing which thoughts of mine are "mine" and which came from Peter. His thoughts have merged into me like two rivers meeting. His thoughts are clothed in my story, in my words, as I pass this legacy on to others.

But in the importance and noise of tomorrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom;
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

O all the instruments agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.
You were silly like us: your gift survived it all;
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself; mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its saying where executives
Would never want to tamper; it flows south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

I recall Susan Barnes telling her towering wisdom figure, the great art collector, Dominique de Menil, "You will have many successors and you will have no successor." That seems so true of Peter.

Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

Peter has perished. His work is done, finished, complete. His "vessel lies empty of its thought."

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

Peter lived in the bloodiest, most murderous century on record. He observed both its awful carnage and its colossal growth clear eyed. He did his best to point out its flaws. He provided us, those of us who remain, with an Alternative to Tyranny, the main theme of his sixty years of hard work. He was responsible. He did not despair. He worked ceaselessly almost to the last to provide us with signposts and a path out of this dark night.

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

He was "unconstrained" by party, ideology, or prejudice. He was not, to use his words, "a prisoner of his own predispositions." He was "unconstraining" too. He was, as he said in Adventures of a Bystander-- "Born to look. Meant to see." He remained a bystander. It was (and is) up to us to take action.

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

He taught us to not cry against the darkness but to "build on the islands of health and strength," to discover and rely on the "healing fountains of the heart." He praised in a quiet and personal way his God in whose "wood" he now finds his happiness.

About Bob Buford
Bob Buford is chairman of the board of The Buford Foundation and Leadership Network, was the co-founder and first chairman of the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management, and has authored four books, including Halftime and most recently Finishing Well. Visit www.ACTIVEenergy.net to register for Bob's ACITVEenergy weekly e-newsletter which is full of Bob Buford’s musing, interviews with world-changers, and resources that will enhance your life and work. Contact him as follows:
Bob Buford, 2501 Cedar Springs Road, Dallas, Texas 75201 USA.
214-754-9733; e-mail: bjengle@leadnet.org

After selling Buford Television, Inc., a large network of cable systems across the country, in July 1999, Bob Buford has turned to investing the remaining years of his life in the lives of others. He is chairman of the board of The Buford Foundation and Leadership Network, was the co-founder and first chairman of the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management, and has authored three books, including Halftime and most recently Finishing Well, which can be found at bookstores everywhere. Bob and his wife, Linda, make their home in Dallas, Texas.