The Drucker Lectures

This is not a “light reading” book, but the way the content is broken up (since it is a collection of speeches) makes it easy to read this book in pieces over time. After reading the first few speeches, I almost gave up on the book since I didn't find the subject matter particularly interesting. I persisted, though, and found that about half-way through the book I was genuinely interested and enjoying the presentation.

It is amazing to note the many things Drucker saw far ahead of his time. What I found particularly useful was his observation–made almost 2 decades ago–that a problem with enterprise information systems is that they tell you everything you might want to know about the inside of your company, but nothing at all about things external. Although the speeches were made well before the creation of Twitter, Facebook, or the like, his speech caused me for the first time to see real value in activities such as sentiment analysis which attempts to bring external points of view into an organization.