Dr Peter Starbuck
Report from Vienna, November 2009

Abstract

In Adventures of a Bystander (1979) Drucker’s only autobiographical book is divided into two collections of essays. The first section is titled “Report from Atlantis”. It is a collection of reflections on the people, and events in the Vienna of his youth.

On 19 and 20 November 2009 The Peter F Drucker Society of Austria organised the first global ‘Peter F Drucker Forum’ in Vienna to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of Drucker’s birth.

The objective of the forum was to pay tribute to one of the great thinkers of our time, and to promote a deep dialogue about the future of management. Not only was one of the aims to bring Drucker’s ideas home to Vienna and Europe, where he spent the first twenty-eight years of his life, but also to examine the relevance of his holistic perspective, and wisdom, in a world that is becoming a more complex matrix of government, business, non-profit, and voluntary organisations.

This paper follows the pattern of Report from Atlantis, and is a personal reflection on the experiences that the writer had at the forum.