Drucker on Leadership: New Lessons from the Father of Modern Management

Chapter 11. Leadership Lessons from Xenophon

Despite his many contributions to management, Drucker did not write much on leadership under the explicit title "leadership" until late in his career. The reason is partially explained in his first book focused entirely on management, The Practice of Management, published in 1954. In this book, Drucker wrote, "The first systematic book on leadership: the Kyropaidaia of Xenophon—himself no mean leader of men—is still the best book on the subject."^[95]

Kyropaidaia is more than two thousand years old, but Drucker hadn't changed his mind twenty-five years later when I was his doctoral student. He told me he found Kyropaidaia, which goes by a number of titles in English, and another book by Xenophon, Anabasis ...