Books in Brief: The Changing World of the Executive

The Changing World of the Executive, by Peter F. Drucker (Truman Talley/Times Books, 271 pp., $16.95). Reading a new book by Peter Drucker is like taking a Sunday stroll through an intellectual minefield. The clear, straightforward prose is refreshing, the rare good sense invigorating; and, every few pages or so,

you run across an unexpected, almost casually put thrust of insight which blasts some hoary old nugget of “common wisdom” to bits. Despite its overly sedate title, The Changing World of the Executive fairly bristles with Mr. Drucker’s remarkable knack for bringing complex issues into sharp focus by isolating one or two key factors which, like the Purloined Letter, tend to be overlooked by more conventional minds. (Who, for example, has gotten to the point about national health insurance more quickly or lethally than Peter Drucker? “The only reason, I suspect, that we still hear of a national health service,” he writes on page 128, “is Senator Edward Kennedy’s—understandable— desire to have his name on one piece of major national legislation.”) Don’t be misled by the management-oriented title, either; more than a few of these essays are, to paraphrase Clemenceau, far too important to be left to the executives, though the Chief Executive would do well to circulate a few dozen copies of “Six Durable Economic Myths” and “A Return to Hard Choices” to his timorous Washington colleagues. If you first read these essays when they originally appeared in the Wall Street Journal and The Public Interest, you’ll be glad to have them between hard covers; if not, do yourself a favor and pick up a copy of The Changing World of the Executive right away.