Peter's Principles

Book editor Rubin talks with Peter Drucker about how he built a long-standing brand around his own knowledge and how to prepare for a career as a solo act.

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When a top book editor decides it's time to chuck a steady paycheck and become a free agent, she seeks advice from a master soloist--Peter Drucker

When I started a business-book company, 10 years ago, I avoided famous gurus and consultants and instead sought out unknown poets, obscure professors of philosophy, and tenuously employed lecturers as authors. Booksellers warned me that I'd be out of a job in six months if I pursued my woo-woo course. This was the best offer I'd ever heard: to try something no one thought would work.

I took the ideas of Peter Senge, Don Peppers, Max DePree, and others and reworked their manuscripts until my blue pencil became like a sixth finger on my right hand. We didn't die in six months. Instead, every book we published became a best-seller, and Currency/Doubleday became the publishing company everyone wanted to imitate or beat.

For years I've had the itch to bail out of corporate life to see if I could do for myself what I'd done for my company. Then, recently, I was visited by a Tibetan monk. He arrived at our Times Square offices, looked out over my prized vice-presidential view of the corporate landscape, and said: "These glass towers look like larvae. I can see the panels shaking as if they are about to break open. It's good news inside for the people who know how to fly."

I decided once and for all to learn how to fly.

I no longer answer my phone, "Harriet Rubin Currency." I am an ex-Bride of Doubleday. But who is plain old Harriet Rubin, and who cares? How would I build a name brand selling no one but me?

No human being has built a better brand by managing just himself than Peter Drucker has. He has represented quality, integrity, and value longer than Intel, Microsoft, or McDonald's has. He has done this in ways that reject the standard formula for success. Although he advocates planning, self-promotion, and team spirit for organizations, he doesn't use them for himself. But then all of Drucker's 29 books leave you wondering how an individual can become as powerful a brand as a corporation.

That's not so strange. Bullfighting may be the only art that is performed entirely in public. But I wanted to learn what Drucker, 88, had done to build his prized name, not just what he'd preached to organizations. Before the phrase intellectual capital came into vogue, Drucker pioneered what it meant to be an intellectual capitalist, someone who puts a price on the knowledge he's accumulated for a world of possible buyers beyond his organization: Your knowledge and experience are your new wealth; they're a commodity that belongs to you and not your company. Leave an organization and you take that wealth with you. The intellectual capitalist is a new species of worker, even more valuable than the CEO.

So I trekked to Drucker's home in Claremont, Calif., to sit lotus style and listen to this great Austrian-born sage. And there I learned Lesson One: To aspire to be even half the intellectual capitalist that Peter Drucker is means that you don't ask the question, "How can an individual become a brand?" Not ever.

Drucker: Think like a bystander.
Rubin: So how does a bystander think?

Forget trying to drum up loads of PR. You are nothing; your knowledge is everything. The whole idea of "you are the brand" is foreign to Drucker. He works by a different MO.

There is nothing flashy about Drucker's wisdom. He packs a lot of knowing into the simplest answers. That, more than habits designed to make him look like a star, has helped him build a lasting reputation. When he says, "I do not care for introspection," it's clear that he's one of the rare people in this world who are important for not being important to themselves. He is a source of ideas, not a celebrity of ideas. Drucker wears two hearing aids, but I was the one who strained to understand him. He speaks a language that is so self-effacing that one is almost deaf to it in our culture of extreme self-promotion.

Although his books praise planning and proactive behavior, Drucker thinks of himself not as a brand but as a bystander. He's almost Zenlike in his watch-and-wait attitude.

In Adventures of a Bystander, an autobiography he wrote in 1978, Drucker describes his life as that of a young man who is standing in the wings but is not part of the action. He is watching everything, "like the fireman in the theater." He is the bystander, the loner. That allows him to see "things neither actor nor audience notices."

He is accident-prone in the best sense. "Every one of my jobs after my first two apprenticeships has come about by accident," he says. "I have never written an application or rÉsumÉ; I wouldn't know how to." He starts several books at a time and only by chance discovers which he wants to complete. "Most of us, if we live long enough, must change careers. If career planning means not being open to opportunity, it doesn't work. Planning should tell you only which opportunities are the right ones for you and which are the wrong ones. I always fell into the right slots. I've never done anything I've planned except planning what additional skills I need for my work."

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