Peter Drucker’s Third Third

This is the first in what will be 52 weekly articles about people who could have retired but chose instead to work past age 70, whether for pay or as a volunteer.

Peter Drucker was one of the most influential business leaders of the 20th Century, but he never led a business. He was a college professor, a writer, and a consultant to the leaders of major corporations worldwide. He considered himself a writer and an economic anthropologist. In 2005 Business Week hailed him as “the man who invented management.”

Mr. Drucker was born in 1909. He published his first book, The End of Economic Man, about the rise of the Nazis in Germany, in 1939. Late in his life Drucker, a believing Christian layman, said he felt he was called by God to prevent another economic collapse like the one that led to the rise of the Nazis.

He published 39 major works, and consulted with the top management of some of the largest companies in the world, beginning with General Motors in 1942

In 1999, at age 89, Peter Drucker published an article in the Harvard Business Review titled Managing Oneself. It is now available as a 60-page book, packed with life wisdom and a few piercingly thoughtful questions. On page 45 Mr. Drucker wrote:

When work for most people meant manual labor, there was no need to worry about the second half of your life. You simply kept on doing what you had always done. And if you were lucky enough to survive 40 years of hard work in the mill or on the railroad, you were quite happy to spend the rest of your life doing nothing. Today, however, most work is knowledge work, and knowledge workers are not “finished” after 40 years on the job, they are merely bored.

Drucker continued to work until age 95. He died in 2005, eight days short of his 96th birthday.

While he advised leaders of huge companies on management, Mr. Drucker knew that he was not a manager himself. He never had more than one or two employees. He answered his own phone. His life and his contribution were focused on his own key strengths. Peter Drucker’s answers for his own third third of life were to continue to do what he had been doing since the 1930s, modifying as he went.

In Managing Oneself Drucker discusses other paths as well: the business manager who returns to law school and becomes a small-town attorney, the business executive who becomes a pastor, the entrepreneur who remains in his company but develops a 10 hour per week volunteer executive position, the operations executive of a large corporation who transitions to running a mid-sized hospital. These people chose to remain challenged by work, either paid or volunteer, while they made a transition to escape boredom and continue to pursue a life of purpose.

Here are a few questions to consider for your own life:

1. What business or career are you in?

2. If you were not in your current business or career, would you enter it today?

3. If the answer is no, what are you going to do about it?

4. Are you bored?

5. What step can you take by next Monday to do something about that? I am not talking about total life disruption here, at least not yet. It can be a small tweak. It just needs to be by next Monday.

Would you like to have me listen while you unpack these questions? E-mail me and let’s set a 30 minute time to do that, no charge.

Do you know someone who is working past age 70? If so, I would love to learn about them.

russ@strategicexit.com