德鲁克先生和他夫人的恋爱故事

　　

德鲁克先生遗孀Doris Drucker博士 点击此处查看全部财经新闻图片

　　2006年11月18日-19日，首届中国彼得·德鲁克高层管理论坛在北京国宾酒店举行，论坛邀请国际德鲁克研究著名人士出席，他们与国内推崇德鲁克管理理念的企业家和社会各界精英汇聚一堂。新浪财经独家直播此次论坛。以下为德鲁克先生遗孀Doris Drucker讲述她和德鲁克先生相识相爱的故事。

　　我想向大家简要的介绍我的丈夫是一个什么样的人，我们一起经历了六七十年的时间，我对他有深刻的印象，我非常珍视他对我的感情。我是奥地利人，他是德国人，我的父母不愿意我们两个谈恋爱，你们知道奥地利人对德国人是憎恨的。第二年我去了荷兰，我去的时候，根本没有和德鲁克打声招呼。后来几年里面，我又去了伦敦，然后在一个学院里面担任教授。一次我在一个很长的地铁里面往上走，德鲁克往下走，突然发现有一个人跟我打招呼，这个人就是彼得.德鲁克，当时我根本不知道他来到了伦敦。我接着往上走，我又从另外一个电梯往这边来，我们相互错过了好几次，最后我们同意有一个人在另一部电梯等着另外一个人走过来。

　　我们有好长时间没有见面了，我们就像一个好朋友好久没有见面一样聊得很开心，所以这是一个令人纪念的日子。从那之后，我们就不断地谈话，交流了很多。后来德鲁克的母亲也知道了事情，他的母亲对我非常的生气，说你怎么能这样做呢，我是不允许你来和他交朋友的。后来，她亲自来到伦敦告诫我，你不能和普鲁士的人交朋友。我的母亲也来到伦敦，她本来是自己出公差的，当时我在为一个大学的教授打扫房间，因为他在美国做了兼职的教授，当时位于伦敦的北部，当时这个地方如果想去的话会比较难，没有比较宽敞的道路，只有一个非常陡峭的小路，都是一些草丛。我的母亲不愿意住在这里，她就住在一个小旅馆里面，因为这个地方比较容易去，交通比较方便。有一天，她来房间看我，她说我要准备晚饭参加我们的晚会，我说可以。实际上，我并不认识几个讲德语的人，我只认识彼得.德鲁克。我母亲说，什么？你还认识这个人吗？我的母亲说不准备晚饭了，我说我来准备晚饭吧。我也不知道怎么做饭，我就从

冰箱里拿出一些罐装的食品，像沙丁鱼、土豆，然后简单的做了一顿晚餐。德鲁克进来的时候，我母亲非常的生气，沉着脸看着我们俩，现场非常的尴尬。而母亲对我说，如果第二天你不离开德鲁克，我就永远不再理你了。吃完晚饭的时候，母亲说要回家了，然后德鲁克说，我送您出门吧。

　　他把母亲送到了门外，然后又进入屋里来。我母亲走了一段路，发现德鲁克没有出来，又返回我的房间，大声的敲门说，让我进去，我知道德鲁克还在房间里面，你们不要欺骗我。我对母亲说，德鲁克真的不在房间里面，然后我对德鲁克说，怎么办呢？我妈妈来了，我把你藏到地下室吧。然后我开门让我的母亲进来，我的母亲进来后就乱翻，她说：我知道德鲁克在这个房间里面，你告诉我他在哪儿。正如你们想得那样，我的母亲把整个房间翻个遍，但是也没有找到德鲁克。我的母亲说，你不能一个人在房间待着，今天我就住在这里了。我说，那你就住这吧，我没有办法。而德鲁克就在地下室里面，又冷又饿。我想第二天德鲁克一定对我非常的生气，非常的不满意。但是他非常奇怪的说，亲爱的，没关系，我还是非常的好，仍旧毫发无损。第二天，我去工作的时候，我还是说，请原谅我，今天我们一起吃饭吧。我向你保证，再也不让你见我的妈妈了。我的母亲对我说，你向我发誓，以后再也不要和这个奥地利人发誓。于是我发誓了，说再也不见这个奥地利人了。

　　德鲁克总是对我说，不要担心，都会好的。后来我的母亲回到德国。她对我说，每次我们谈起她对我强迫性的发誓，我都觉得非常可笑，因为强迫性的发誓是没有用的。于是我对她发誓了，发誓之后，我的母亲走了。我的母亲刚刚上车，德鲁克不知从哪个角落出来，然后我们拥抱了起来，走在了一起，这是一件非常有趣的事情。

    以下为德鲁克先生遗孀Doris Drucker博士演讲英文稿：

　　My Days with Peter F. Drucker by Dr. Doris Drucker

　　Peter and I met at the University in Frankfurt, Germany. My mother forbade me to date with him. He was an Austrian and we were German – Prussians to boot. Austrians and Germans hated each other. Nevertheless Peter and I went out together other occasionally but there was no particular attachment, and when I left for Holland the next year I did not even say good-bye to him.

　　Fast backward another year when I was in London in England, I was a research assistant to a professor of International Law. Unbeknownst to me, Peter was also in England working at an insurance company. One day I was riding on he downward escalator that led to the subway at Piccadilly Circus. Suddenly somebody hailed me from the upward going escalator that ran parallel to mine. It was Peter. We waved frantically at each other. As soon as I reached the bottom I took the escalator go up again. Peter s switched to the escalator going down when he reached the top. We sailed past each other four times until one of us finally gave in and waited for the other. Peter later described it as the happiest moment of my life.

　　We had not communicated at all since I left Frankfurt. Yet, having found each other at a London subway station, we talked and talked as if he had been best friend all along, and then we really became best friends.

　　Several months later, word got to Peter’s mother in Vienna that he was dating a Prussian. Terrible! Mrs.Drucker senior immediately dispatched a girl whom Peter used to date when both were in High School to London, to get him away from me, “that Prussian”. To Mrs.Drucker’s disappointment, that girl was unsuccessful. Sometime after that, my mother appeared in London, on business of her own. At that time I was house sitting for the Professors family while they were on a lecture tour in America. The house situated in a very lonely spot in Hampstead Heath, in the northern part of London. It was difficult to reach; there was just one footpath up and down a steep hill through tall grasses. My mother therefore stayed in a bed-and-breakfast, which was more accessible. One day she decided to invite some very distant German relatives to dinner at “my” house. She asked me to invite at least one more guest, anybody who was fluent in German. Otherwise she anticipated that it would be a very boring evening with those two people we hardly knew. I said that the only person I knew would be Peter Drucker. Mother was appalled: what? You are still seeing that Austrian? You know how I dislike Austrians. They are frivolous people. They are not aware of the seriousness of life. And they always play the violin. I assured her that Peter did not play the violin and she gave in because she knew of nobody else. She went back to her bed and breakfast leaving it to me to get dinner. Unskilled as I was– had never learned to cook. I got some cans - of food out of the pantry, put them in a bowl and put the bowl into the oven. The bowl, which was not heatproof, cracked almost immediately, and all the food exploded. At that moment Peter arrived, and the two of us tried to salvage what we could. But there was nothing else in the pantry except a can of sardines and a few potatoes – which we divided among five plates that was our dinner. Mother glowered, and it was a most embarrassing situation. The guests left immediately after dinner, Mother also decided to leave after threatening to punish me the next day for my lack of hospitality. Peter offered to escort her up the very steep path through the grass. Before leaving, he whispered he’d come back to me immediately. And he did. I was so upset I was crying and he tried to comfort me. Suddenly there was a loud knock at the door: My Mother. “ Let me in” she cried, he is here, I know it, I followed him, “ I saw the light in the door when you opened it for him. Where is he? I whispered to Peter: “I have to hide you, she must not find you here, where can you hide, she will look in all the cupboards, under all the beds, where can you go? Wait – the coal bin in the basement. So poor Peter spent the night locked in that cold and dark place while my mother as predicted turned the house upside down,” where is he?” Sometime after midnight without having found him she declared that I must not stay alone in that house, I must come with her, and sleep on the floor in her room. All night long she berated me for disobeying her command never to date an Austrian. Next morning on my way to work I phoned Peter. “Please meet me for lunch.” I was so upset that he would be angry and never would want to see me again. I began to cry when he entered the restaurant. Amazingly he was not angry on me, he thought it had been a very funny adventure. An elderly waitress came to the table. “Don’t cry, dear,” she said, “you’ll be alright, and he looks like a good man”. She was right – why was I crying? Peter was not mad at me for locking him into the coal bin, and that was all that mattered.

　　A few days later I saw my mother off at the railroad station for her trip back to Germany. Waiting on the platform she reminded me that I had sworn an oath never to see that dreadful Austrian again. I said ok. – An oath sworn under duress is anyhow worthless. When the train started to move, Peter, the object of her scorn, came out from behind the pillar where he had hidden. We fell into each other’s arms – and from that moment on we knew we belonged to one another for life.

　　And what a wonderful and interesting life it was! It was not always smooth sailing. You have to remember that the world in which we started our married life was in turmoil. Hitler was ravaging Europe, and threatened to destroy civilization, as we knew it. The United States is in a deep depression – and nobody really knew how to get out of it. We knew that we would have to support our parents who had lost all their money in the devastating inflation of the early 1920s. But with luck, and with the goodwill of many people – too many to name – we made it. Peter wrote his first book: The End of Economic Man, and I had a baby. Then he wrote “The Future of Industrial Man” and I had another baby. The third book Landmarks of Tomorrow and the third baby appeared next, but after the fourth child I decided to leave that competitive field – and a good thing too – he wrote 37 because he wrote a total of 37 books! It is still a puzzle to me how he did it – in addition to his teaching load and the consultations with so many clients. He used to say, “half in jest:” I learn by listening to myself talk – but in reality he was so disciplined, he was thinking about all kinds of subjects instead just whiling away the time as most of us do.

　　We bounced around a good bit in our early days; we left England and came to America where we settled – by accident ikn a very nice suburb of New York. Initially, both of us had a small income by reporting on American conditions to our previous employers in England, and by the time those contracts ran out, we were able to make some sort of living. Next we moved to the State of Vermont, where Peter accepted a teaching position at a well-known College. We lived there in a very pretty rural community. I loved both the environment and the intellectual stimulation of many interesting faculty members. Eight years later, the drawback of a very inferior public school system for our children induced us to move away – that time to New Jersey, just across the Hudson river from New York, where Peter received an appointment as Professor at the Graduate New York School of Business. And finally, after 21 years in that position we moved in 1971 in Claremont California. Until 2 years ago Peter taught at what is now called the Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management

　　As Peter’s reputation had grown, demands on his time increased and he started to travel a lot – both in the United States and abroad. If the trip was in a foreign country for lecturing and consulting, I would join him, with or without children, for about one or two weeks or so for vacation time. He loved to travel, and to make plans where to go for sightseeing and all that. I think he must have been a travel agent in some former life. On one memorable trip we packed all children into a Volkswagen bus and drove from Paris down to Spain, East to the South of France, then to Italy, north again to Switzerland and back to France. That was a happy time none of us will ever forget. Some time ago we bought a small cottage in the Rocky Mountains where we would spend a few weeks during the summer. We enjoy mountain climbing and horseback riding. Peter always liked to identify wild flowers and trees; he looked up the names in nature books- while I was – and am – totally indifferent.

　　Now that I have given you the outer frame of Peter’s life, you will probably ask me: what was he like as a human being. I cannot even begin to describe his many wonderful qualities. He widened my horizon immensely by sharing with me his thoughts on hundreds of topics: history, philosophy, economics, and art. He was incredibly well read – an area where I could not keep up with him. In literature he loved the works of Jane Austen, Trollope, Dickens, and Thackeray – all the British authors of the 18th and early 19th century.

　　He read and reread their books many times. If he could have chosen, I think he would have liked to live like the persons in those novels – gentlemen who had inherited some money and were able to live what he thought was a civilized life. He was of course aware that those times were over, but he never approved real modern technological inventions, which made life so much easier for all of us. He used a typewriter – but what he wanted most was a quill pen to write. When the manual typewriter disappeared, he angrily switched to an electric typewriter and then, even more unwillingly to an electronic one. He refused to use a computer and could not believe that top managers and high corporation executives wrote email messages them. That is a typist’s job, he grumbled. We smiled at his old fashioned stance. Yes, I am an old-fashioned … he would admit – but tell me what do al these new technological devices contribute in terms of human development? Do they make man more learned human being? Or more compassionate human being?

　　Although he refused to use a computer he admitted that the computer is an invaluable instrument because it helps solve problems that would be impossible to solve by the usual calculations. But for the average person the high speed of communication is quite unnecessary and mostly really damaging. Because the faster you can send a message, the larger the number of messages that can be transmitted in a given time. With so many messages spread out in front of them, there is a greater temptation for people to devour them, no matter how inferior their content is. Look at the low standard of mot TV shows – or of the majority of movies. We know what happens to people who see a vast quantity of rood spread out in front of them. They gorge on the food, become obese, get sick and die. A similar thing is happening to people who gorge themselves on electronic messages: they become mentally obese and sluggish, the greater their consumption of information. That is useless chatter.

　　Is this an idiosyncratic point of view? But as with so many ideas he had that were ahead of his time, he may turn out to have been right. When Winston Churchill reviewed Peter’s book “Y The End of Economic Man” in a large British newspaper, he praised the author for the clarity of his writing but added something like…” but the young man is going overboard in predicting that Hitler an Stalin will make a pact”. Three months later, Peter’s prediction became true.

　　I could go on and on talking about Peter – my favorite subject. Looking Back, I know we managed our life together – according to a German proverb: “In any marriage the husband decides how to solve serious problems, and the wife makes the decisions how to solve unserious problems. But in a happy marriage there are no serious problems.