Educational Entrepreneurship andManagement as a Liberal Art
When I stepped into the modest office of California Institute of Advanced Management (CIAM), I was touched by the spirit of commitment and determination of the team led by Dr. Bill Cohen to contribute to the promotion of Drucker’s teaching in a unique way. This spirit sensed familiar.It reminded me of my work in 2005 in setting up the first joint venture university between Hong Kong and the Chinese Mainland. The physical condition was limiting and yet the spirit transcended it all.
My visit to CIAM for the first time in June 2013 was arranged in the context of my service to Bright China Foundation and the later established Drucker Academy Group (China). I received my doctoral education at Berkeley in the mid-1970s. Since then, I have already heard of the growing influential work of Drucker in Claremont. However, it was not until the end of 2012, after having read Professor Joseph Maciariello’s new book, Drucker’s Lost Art of Management that I suddenly realized that my graduate studies at Berkeley and all the teaching and research work thereafter for more than 30 years overlapped exactly with the intellectual evolution of Drucker’s thought and teaching. Having taken up the study of comparative modern European and Chinese intellectual history, with an emphasis on modern German history and a doctoral theses on the first political college set up in Weimar Republic Berlin inheriting Max Weber’s “politics as science” and“politics as vocation”, Drucker, in fact, has been a representative figure in my teaching and research. Recently I recalled an episode in 1979 when I finished my doctoral research in the archive of Koblenz, West Germany, contemplating on the future of Chinese people in light of modern German and European development. This, in fact, is exactly what struck me most when I read Professor Maciariello’s book in 2012.“ May Drucker’s lost art of management be an answer to the questions that I have been asking academically and intellectually? May Drucker’s intellectual framework of management as a liberal art be able to provide insights into the interpretation of the complex issues of China’s‘modern fate’ (quoting Professor Joseph Levenson’s famous term)?”
All these and other related questions were behind my mind when I visited CIAM in June 2013 and then March 2014. Bill presented us a vision of how executive management education may be constructed innovatively transcending physical limitations. When I set up the new joint venture university in China in 2005, I was confronted with even more formidable challenges of having to establish a new university within less than a year and with an actual spendable budget of less than HK 10 million. The spirit of entrepreneurship that was lively manifested in CIAM brought back a lot of indelible memories.
It is with this spirit that I humbly read Bill’s book Drucker on Leadership. I can see through the lines how the Drucker’s values were deeply implanted into the thinking and work of Bill as I can understand from his pioneering work at this institute. If leadership is responsibility and service, Bill has practised it vividly and convincingly. If leadership involves a process of sharing and building of values, mission and vision, Bill has demonstrated that he has the will and commitment to take up the challenge, with an air of educational entrepreneur baptized by the firmness of military training. If leadership implies the role of marketing of ideas and values, the role of influence and persuasion on strategy and tactics, Bill has led CIAM to break open the innovative path filled with institutional barriers and socioeconomic inertia.
Drucker has established and shaped the community of management practice and learning. His influence has infiltrated and soaked into every corner and level of the community. Through his books on Drucker’s rich treasure of knowledge and experience, Bill has provided a solid foundation on which he is building this unique institute of Drucker executive education.
How does the world learn more deeply and widely of Drucker’s legacy through these writings contributed by Bill is a broad question to be contemplated. However, it is most encouraging that the Chinese community is blessed with this opportunity to read Bill’s works translated into Chinese.As he is successfully building his team in a clear and effective way, his writing is simple and direct revealing the military leadership culture in which he has been groomed up.
The ultimate question for a Chinese student of Drucker like me still remains: How will the Chinese community of management practitioners and students learn from Drucker through the writings of Bill now being translated into Chinese? With the dominant Chinese cultural tradition of integrating theory and practice, the insights shared by Bill will be able to help the Chinese readers appreciate how Drucker’s values of management have been realized in a social ecological way that emphasizes how individual human values, his/her dignity and her accountability to society may be actualized through proper and moral management practices. After all, human nature has limitations that can only be transcended through liberation of “ self-centerness”, one of core values in Drucker’s teaching of“ management as a liberal art ”. Drucker reached the phase of postmodernism sooner than anyone may have noticed. He looked at history as a process during which the constructive and moral values of management can be clearly and solidly actualized. Bill’s writings help us subtly appreciate this process.His educational entrepreneurial endeavor convinces us that this process is achievable integrating theory and practice.
A humble civilian salute to an esteemed military leader of the academia!
Professor KWOK Siu-tong (Edmund)
Vice-Chairman
Drucker Academy Group (China)
