Introducing the All-New “Drucker Now” Mobile App

Sometimes the best way to say goodbye is to build the farewell into one’s plan from the very start.

We could have used a dose of that thinking ourselves in November 2009. That’s when we launched “Drucker Now,” an iPhone app tied to the Drucker Centennial, the worldwide celebration of Peter Drucker’s 100th birthday.

Apps were relatively expensive and difficult to develop back then. Organizations of our size didn’t have much of a presence on mobile phones. And we had barely enough content ready to justify the move—we had only recently opened our Twitter account and we were still “blogging” in a twice-monthly email newsletter rather than here on the Drucker Exchange. Simply showing up on the iTunes app store was a heady moment for us.

Since then, mobile apps have grown up. They are now a preeminent tool for all kinds of organizations to do all kinds of things. And yet it has been more than two years since Drucker Now was released and more than 18 months since we last updated it. The app doesn’t include some of our best and newest content. It isn’t available for Android phones. It feels kind of klunky.

No doubt, our feeling of achievement at the launch moment, coupled with the cost of getting there, made it hard for us to face the reality that we were long overdue for a new effort. But clearly we were.

In fact, none other than Peter Drucker expressed great admiration for the Japanese and their penchant for “deciding in advance that they will abandon a new product within a given period of time” and forcing themselves “to go to work immediately on replacing it.”

Today it is our great pleasure to announce the release of an all-new Drucker Now mobile app. It’s free and it’s available for both iPhone and Android. And we’ve better prepared ourselves to practice kaizen (the Japanese notion of continuous improvement) by building serious analytics into the app that will tell us which of its features are engaging for our users and which aren’t.

Oh, yes: And we’ve also already begun work on the new mobile app that we hope will replace this one sometime next year.

Download the new Drucker Now app (from iTunes for iPhone or from Google for Android) and let us know what you think!