William A Cohen or Bill Cohen as he is popularly known as, was the first graduate of the world’s first executive Ph.D programme in Management. Through this book he tries to capture Drucker as a professor - his methodology of teaching and focusses mostly on the lessons not so well captured in any of the existing Drucker books.
Peter Drucker - the Father of Modern Management come out live as Cohen takes us through the many sessions and discussions they had in class. He rightly says that Peter always told us what to do but never how to do it. It was always left for us to figure out.
The book begins by giving a description of Bill Cohen’s life, his career and how he became a student of Peter Drucker. This is followed by 17 learnings from Peter’s classes. The best part of this book is the way learnings have been described - mostly with the help of real or hypothetical examples and a chapter always ends with the author’s own analysis of what he understood and his take - away.
And for people who prefer to read the summary before deciding on whether to continue with the chapter or not, there is a capsule of Drucker’s lessons at the end of each chapter. All of these are wel written, sometimes even added with author’s own inputs keeping present business scenario in mind. However, certain chapters just reign supreme or probably can be labelled as my personal favourite.
Like the one on " What everybody knows is generally wrong". Being a marketing major, I was always under this assumption that selling is a part of marketing. However, many like me had been shown the correct way by Drucker that marketing and selling are indeed adversaries and definitely justified with situations.
The book can be described as a superior product in all senses - Eventhough paying USD 24.95 seems like an expensive deal, the learnings, experiences and feelings post reading this books are few of those to be cherished for a life time. And if you are a MBA aspirant, MBA grad or realted to the field of business in anyway, this is definitely a must - read.