Today was Drucker Day at my school where I got my MBA. So I went to see some old friends. Hard to believe I graduated 10 years ago. Friends asked me how old my daughter was, the one who almost tripped Peter Drucker when she was 2 or 3 (which is how I met him), and I told them a Sophomore in High School, and they were surprised. I have a two pictures, one of Peter frowning with my daughter smiling, the next with her frowning and him smiling. The development person when I showed her the pictures said that was Peter.

In Peter Drucker's class I also presented my business plan for Childbook and he critiqued it (and gave me an A-, after he said an A, such is life). I got to sit next to him as he talked about it, because it reminded him of the vibrant German bilingual community that was in the US before WW1 destroyed it.

Today was the 100th anniverary of Peter Drucker's birth, he passed away 3 years ago, a few days before that years alumni day.

Labels: Peter F Drucker

China Embraces Old-School Business Guru from the Wall Street Journal. It's talking about what Bright China is doing to spread the wisdom of Peter F. Drucker, a management guru who recently passed away with a series of academies, donations to libraries of translations of Peter Drucker's books, and more.

I have mixed feelings on the article. The characterization of the US as being behind on following Drucker verses China is not 100% accurate. For the Drucker Societies that is true. In the US we had the luxury of a live Peter Drucker for many years and a management university that bears his name, The Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management. This made it so the Drucker Societies were not needed in the US, since we had the crutch of Peter being around. So any meeting in the US will have a lot of alumni of the Drucker Business School (like me) and the Drucker Societies are just starting in the US.

Peter Drucker has had a huge impact on business including his consulting(GE, P&G, Intel, etc.), books he has written defining the study of management, and his non-profit consulting (girl scouts, etc.). His books continue to be huge sellers in the US and new collections of his articles are being published all the time. This indicates to me there is still a lot of interest in Drucker's teachings in the US.

The challenge and opportunity is to harness this to build up the Drucker Societies in the US. I am involved with the Drucker Society of Los Angeles and we just had our first real event today, a great presentation called Closing the Responsibility Gap. The societies in China, South Korea, and Japan have been around for years so of course they are ahead of the US Societies that are relatively new.

Labels: Peter F Drucker

I listened to the founder of Bright China today. Wow! Smart person and sounds very exciting what they are trying to do. I should hear more about what they are doing tomorrow. They are bringing the wisdom of Peter F. Drucker to China with a series of academies and more.

I am attending the Drucker Society Global Symposium, June 11-13. I did graduate from the Drucker School, and my business plan for ChildBook was presented in his class. I am also on the board of the The Drucker Society of Los Angeles - your free to join!

Labels: Peter F Drucker

There is a Peter F. Drucker Academy in China. Bright China Management Institute is running these academies and from I heard today from the Drucker Dean of the Biz School in Claremont (the original Drucker School), Ira Jackson, they have a huge amount of graduates. I do appreciate the two pages, Why Drucker and Who is Peter F. Drucker. I wish my school had that - hint, hint... The school assumes everyone knows who Peter Drucker is.

As a Drucker Alumni, and it's Peter's fault I started this business. In a class of his I took there was a requirement for a project, so I did one about starting an online business selling Chinese Children Books. He called me up in his class and discussed German in the US has been a popular second language with large community of German speakers. He pointed out how this community of German speakers disappeared. Reading more on it was due a lot to World war 1. More about Childbook's history. How I met Peter was at a welcoming picnic for incoming students, and my daughter almost tripped him. He was nice enough to take a picture with her (except I could not get a picture with both of them smiling at the same time).

I went to the first meeting of the Los Angeles Drucker Society today and I look forward to future meetings! There are a number of societies around, including China, and I recommend anyone interested in society and management to attend a meeting. For a great read, I suggest his autobiography, Adventures of a Bystander

Labels: drucker and china, Peter F Drucker

Bilingualism in the US has an interesting history. A community that had a huge amount of a second language presence was Germans in the US before World War I. Peter F. Drucker mentioned this to me when I was presented my paper on what became Childbook.com With World War I, instruction in German was banned in many schools, German newspapers in the US stopped publishing. An online book covers the subject. A German American was even lynched. German Americans were the largest immigrant group at the time who were still keeping their original language. Around 9 Million in 1910 still spoke German. In England, the Royal Family changed it's name from the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha became the House of Windsor, Battenberg became Mountbatten and the German Shepherd was renamed the Alsatian (only going back in 1977 to German Shepherd).

Bilingual Education in the US is usually associated with Spanish. Title VII in 1968 and 1977 gave funding for children who had low English proficiency. At the time this was known as ELS - English Language Learners, but the current terminology is LEP - Limited English Proficiency. It used to be ESL, English as a Second Language. 1974 Equal Education Act of 1974 was interpreted that limited English Proficiency should not bar students from getting a good education. In 1967, Ronald Reagan (California Governor) signed a law allowing the other languages to be used for education besides English, overturning an 1872 law. In 1998 in California, Proposition 227 passed that basically banned using Bilingual Education as a method for teaching English in public schools.

Proposition 227 was passed by voters because they felt that public schools were not doing a great job of teaching English to students using bilingual education. There is a lot of debate on this still, but the politics in my opinion is proposition 227 is going to stay in force for the foreseeable future. Scores of students whom were Learning English have improved since the passage of Prop. 227, the reason for this is hotly debated. Smaller class sizes were implemented, increases in funding, new teaching methods, etc.

The preferred method for Learning English currently is called SDAI, or Structured Designed Academic Development. Translation - classes are taught in English, but with a lot of body language and easier words so students can understand. It's like the ESL classes I taught for adults. How bilingual education was originally done in the US, was classes would be done in a foreign language so the students understood, then theoretically they would be gradually introduced to English. The prior widespread idea, that was labeled Bilingual Education being if they were proficient in a subject in their native language, it would be easy for them to understand it in English. What happened was many students never graduated from the bilingual classes.

There are some schools that are doing some very exciting work to be true bilingual schools. This is where students are taught for example both in English and another language. Private schools have done this for a while, but some public schools are now doing this. I will have some names in a future post.

Some of them off the top of my head:

• Cupertino - Northern California, public school

• International School of the Peninsula in Palo Alto, California - Private

• Chinese American International School in San Francisco

Unfortunately I don't know of any full time bilingual schools in Souther California. Lots of weekend schools.

Labels: Bilingual History in the US, Peter F Drucker