Peter Drucker was introduced to the International Symposium on Small Business in Seoul Korea in 1977 as one of the most respected management consultants in the world and a former advisor to US President Gerald Ford.
In his keynote address, which I never forgot, he said that the greatest challenge facing the world is the armies of young people being educated in all the developing countries that will be coming in the labour market over the next five years.
And if the major corporations in the west do not invest in these countries and create employment, these nations will turn to communism.
He made the point quite clearly that these nations do not have the necessary leadership and know-how to build economies that can absorb their labour forces. And he was talking about nations like Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam.
The point was that all these developing nations are focusing on the education of their youth as a primary strategy to stimulate long-term growth of their economies.
But according to Peter Drucker, education is also about preparing its youth to become active citizens and involved in the governance of their societies. So how the west responds to the needs of the youth of these societies will determine their futures.
The reason I never forgot that speech was because it was the beginning of what we call the global economy with large global companies buying and selling to themselves in nations around the world. Globalism is the product of global education.
In an industrial park in the Philippines I saw over 200 major US corporate production facilities under construction. And I also saw the city of Manila grind to a halt at 3:00 pm when all the children poured out of their schools. Peter Drucker knew what he was talking about.
Peter Drucker said that all these developing nations have their own set of challenges, whether it was creating employment, coping with environmental degradation, reducing poverty or avoiding conflict.
But education, he explained, must be the basic strategy for dealing with their diverse challenges.
And in terms of understanding the global nature of education, and the photo does a good job, I witnessed the education of young people in societies as diverse as China, Poland and the Ukraine.
In China we were approached by large numbers of students who wanted to practice their English. And they all spoke English without an accent.
And in Poland and the Ukraine, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, I witnessed educational programs to teach the basics of free enterprise economics so their citizens could build companies and jobs that were functional in the global free market economy.
At home and during my six years as a teacher at the Ryerson Polytechnic Institution, I tried to use stories to teach more than the basics of finance. The interest of students was to get a job upon graduation, but I tried to teach them the importance of creativity in business.
For example, I explained how my father in creating a retail clothing and manufacturing business had to be creative to deal with a shortage of capital. Something that plagues all new small businesses during their early years.
His solution. Sell on a cash basis, but pay suppliers on a 60-day basis.
And to deal with the fact that he could not afford the rent for a store on the large retail traffic streets like Yonge Street or Bloor Street he located on Bay Street and had to have an advertising strategy that brought customers to his location.
His innovation was what we call editorial advertising which combined political and religious commentary with ads for his made to measure custom made suits and overcoats. And to his great surprise, his readership of his ads was higher than the readership of the newspaper’s editorial page.
I used to say to my students that success in business as an employee or an entrepreneur is about innovating and persevering, innovating and persevering, innovating and persevering. And I think I made my point.
Yes, I believe in “edumacation”.