Drucker on Asia

There are no underdeveloped countries anymore, only mismanaged ones, declares bestselling management thinker Drucker in this series of conversations, letters and faxes exchanged in 1994-1995 with Japanese retail mogul Nakauchi. Drucker, who dominates their dialogue, emphasizes that developing nations don't need government-to-government aid or grandiose World Bank projects but, instead, partnerships with private enterprises in industrial nations. Nakauchi discusses the problems of doing business in China and stresses that Japan urgently needs to amend its conformist educational system as well as its industrial structure to foster innovation, entrepreneurship and creativity. Their wide-ranging talks, broken up by subheads for easy reference, briefly touch on a multitude of topics, from ways to reconstruct and revitalize an enterprise to the failure to stop nuclear proliferation. Drucker offers unusually candid autobiographical asides here but spends too much time on commonplace observations and themes familiar to readers of his previous books. (Dec.)