Peter Drucker (From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) States, where he became a university professor as well as a free-lance writer
university professor as well as a free-lance writer and business consultant.
Peter Ferdinand Drucker
November 19, 1909
Born
Kaasgraben, Vienna, Austria
November 11, 2005
Died
Claremont, California, USA
Occupation Writer, Professor, Management Consultant
Peter Ferdinand Drucker (November 19, 1909 – November 11, 2005) was a writer, management
consultant, and self-described “social ecologist.”[1] His books and scholarly and popular articles
explored how humans are organized across the business, government and the nonprofit sectors of
society.[2] His writings have predicted many of the major developments of the late twentieth century,
including privatization and decentralization; the rise of Japan to economic world power; the decisive
importance of marketing; and the emergence of the information society with its necessity of lifelong
learning.[3] In 1959, Drucker coined the term “knowledge worker" and later in his life considered
knowledge work productivity to be the next frontier of management.[4]
Personal life and roots of his philosophy
The son of a high-level civil servant in Austria-Hungary – his mother Caroline Bondi had studied
medicine and his father Steve Anderson Drucker was a lawyer – Drucker was born in Vienna, the
capital of Austria, in a small village named Kaasgraben (now part of the 19th district of Vienna,
Döbling). He grew up in a home where intellectuals, high government officials, and scientists would
meet to discuss new ideas.[5] After graduating from Döbling Gymnasium, Drucker found few
opportunities for employment in post-Habsburg Vienna, so he moved to Hamburg, Germany, first
working as an apprentice at an established cotton trading company, then as a journalist, writing for
Der Österreichische Volkswirt (The Austrian Economist). Drucker then moved to Frankfurt, where he
took a job at the Daily Frankfurter General-Anzeiger. While in Frankfurt, he also earned a doctorate in
international law and public law from the University of Frankfurt in 1931. Among his early influences
was the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, a friend of his father’s, who impressed upon Drucker
the importance of innovation and entrepreneurship.[6] Drucker also was influenced, in a much different
way, by John Maynard Keynes, whom he heard lecture in 1934 in Cambridge. “I suddenly realized
that Keynes and all the brilliant economic students in the room were interested in the behavior of
commodities,” Drucker wrote, “while I was interested in the behavior of people.”[7]
Over the next 70 years, Drucker’s writings would be marked by a focus on relationships among human
beings, as opposed to the crunching of numbers. His books were filled with lessons on how
organizations can bring out the best in people, and how workers can find a sense of community and
dignity in a modern society organized around large institutions.[8]
As a young writer, Drucker wrote two pieces — one on the conservative German philosopher
Friedrich Julius Stahl and another called “The Jewish Question in Germany” — that were burned and
banned by the Nazis.[3] In 1933, Drucker left Germany for England. In London, he worked for an
insurance company, then as the chief economist at a private bank. He also reconnected with Doris
Schmitz, an acquaintance from the University of Frankfurt. They married in 1934. (His wedding
certificate lists his name as Peter Georg Drucker.[9]) The couple permanently relocated to the United
(Drucker disliked the term “guru,” though it was often applied to him; “I have been saying for many
years,” Drucker once remarked, “that we are using the word ‘guru’ only because ‘charlatan’ is too
long to fit into a headline.”)[10]
In 1943, Drucker became a naturalized citizen of the United States. He taught at Bennington College
from 1942-1949, then at New York University as a Professor of Management from 1950 to 1971.
Drucker came to California in 1971, where he developed one of the country's first executive MBA
programs for working professionals at Claremont Graduate University (then known as Claremont
Graduate School). From 1971 to his death he was the Clarke Professor of Social Science and
Management at Claremont Graduate University. The university's management school was named the
"Peter F. Drucker Graduate School of Management" (later known as the "Peter F. Drucker and
Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management") in his honor in 1987. He taught his last class at the
school in 2002 at age 92.
Basic ideas
Several ideas run through most of Drucker's writings:
• Decentralization and simplification. Drucker discounted the command and control model and
asserted that companies work best when they are decentralized. According to Drucker,
corporations tend to produce too many products, hire employees they don't need (when a
better solution would be outsourcing), and expand into economic sectors that they should
avoid.
• A profound skepticism of macroeconomic theory. Drucker contended that economists of all
schools fail to explain significant aspects of modern economies.
• Respect of the worker. Drucker believed that employees are assets and not liabilities. He
taught that knowledge workers are the essential ingredients of the modern economy. Central to
this philosophy is the view that people are an organization's most valuable resource and that a
manager's job is to prepare and free people to perform. [17]
• A belief in what he called "the sickness of government." Drucker made nonpartisan claims
that government is often unable or unwilling to provide new services that people need or want,
though he believed that this condition is not inherent to the form of government. The chapter
"The Sickness of Government" in his book The Age of Discontinuity formed the basis of the
New Public Management, a theory of public administration that dominated the discipline in
the 1980s and 1990s.
• The need for "planned abandonment". Businesses and governments have a natural human
tendency to cling to "yesterday's successes" rather than seeing when they are no longer useful.
• A belief that taking action without thinking is the cause of every failure.[18]
• The need for community. Early in his career, Drucker predicted the "end of economic man"
and advocated the creation of a "plant community" where individuals' social needs could be
met. He later acknowledged that the plant community never materialized, and by the 1980s,
suggested that volunteering in the nonprofit sector was the key to fostering a healthy society
where people found a sense of belonging and civic pride.
• The need to manage business by balancing a variety of needs and goals, rather than
subordinating an institution to a single value.[19][20] This concept of management by objectives
forms the keynote of his 1954 landmark The Practice of Management.[21]
• A company's primary responsibility is to serve its customers. Profit is not the primary goal,
but rather an essential condition for the company's continued existence.[22]
• An organization should have a proper way of executing all its business processes.
• A belief in the notion that great companies could stand among humankind's noblest
inventions.[23]