Drucker, Peter Ferdinand

DRUCKER, PETER FERDINAND

Peter Drucker (1909–) is considered to be the founding father of modern management. In a career that spanned most of the twentieth century Drucker has remained a highly influential writer, teacher, and philosopher of business management principles. The author of more than 30 books that have been translated into at least 25 languages, Drucker's contributions to management have been likened to Isaac Asimov's influence on astronomy.

Born in Austria as the eldest son of a liberal civil service official, Peter Drucker grew up among a cultured society that admired the city of Vienna before World War I (1914–18). After high school Drucker left war-torn Austria to take an apprentice job at an export firm in Hamburg, Germany. To please his father he also enrolled in University of Hamburg to study law. Although young Drucker worked during the day, the University offered no evening classes. He passed his courses by taking final exams without attending a single class. That was not to say that he did not study; many of Drucker's evenings during his college years were spent reading library books printed in various languages.

In 1929 the twenty-year-old Drucker published his first article, in which he confidently predicted that the stock market would rise. A few weeks later the market crashed. Having learned a lasting lesson about the unpredictable nature of stock markets, an older and wiser Drucker confessed that this was the last financial prediction he ever made. "Fortunately, there is no copy of the journal left," he stated in his book The Concept of a Corporation.

Drucker earned his doctorate in public and international law from the University of Frankfurt while working as an editor and financial writer. Shortly after the Nazis came into power in 1933, Drucker was offered a job as a writer by the Ministry of Information. Because he was opposed to Nazism, Drucker dared to publish a pamphlet that ridiculed that party's oppressive, totalitarian politics. The Nazis banned and burned the pamphlet. Drucker soon left Germany for England, where he took a job at an insurance company as a securities analyst.

While attending a Cambridge University seminar led by the famous economist John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) Drucker suddenly realized his interest was in people, not economics. He shifted his focus of study to management. In 1937 he came to the United States as the correspondent for British financial newspapers. Drucker's first book, The End of Economic Man: The Origins of Totalitarianism, was published in 1939. In his lifetime more than 30 well-received books would follow.

In 1943 General Motors allowed Drucker to study their management practices. His observations of GM set the tone for The Concept of a Corporation, the first book to treat a business enterprise as a political and social institution. Concept of a Corporation became one of the most popular management books in history. It advocated the emerging era of cooperation between labor and management by explaining one of Drucker's most famous ideas—employees having managerial responsibility in job structure and the performance of major tasks, as well as decision–making power over schedules, safety codes, and work benefits. But when Drucker first proposed these ideas during the 1940s, they were considered a rebellious challenge to managerial authority.

Drucker has said that writing is the foundation of all his work. His topics are varied and include advice to managers in Managing for Results (1964) and The Effective Executive (1966); general management in Management: Task, Responsibilities, Practices (1974); social and political analysis in The Age of Discontinuity (1969); essay collections such as The Ecological Vision (1993), and two novels. His famous autobiography was titled Adventures of a Bystander (1979).

Along with his books Drucker also wrote articles for the world's most respected business journals, including Forbes, Inc., New Perspectives, The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Harvard Business Review, Foreign Affairs, The Public Interest, and The Economist. From 1975 to 1995, he wrote a monthly column in the Wall Street Journal.

Drucker spent his life teaching others as a consultant and as a professor. He served on the faculties of Sarah Lawrence, Bennington College, New York University, and the Claremont Graduate School. He taught not only management and economics but also government, statistics, religion, philosophy, and literature. Every three to four years of his teaching career he would take on a new subject, ranging from Japanese art to sixteenth-century finance. Drucker said that in more than half a century of teaching he never found a subject that did not spark his interest.

Sixty years after the publication of his first book, Peter Drucker remained a mentor to generations of managers. He was respected for his past insights and the originality of his contemporary ideas. As he approached the age of 90, Drucker appeared on the cover of Forbes magazine with the caption "Still the Youngest Mind."

FURTHER READING

Beatty, Jack. The World According to Peter Drucker. New York: The Free Press, 1998.

Drucker, Peter. Adventures of a Bystander. New York: Harper & Row, 1979.

Galagan, Patricia A., and Stephen H. Rhinesmith. "Peter Drucker: Interview with Management Guru." Training and Development, September 1998.

Johnson, Mike. "Drucker Speaks His Mind." Management Review, October 1995.

Tarrant, John J. Drucker: The Man Who Invented Corporate Society. Boston: Cahners, Books, Inc., 1976.