Peter Drucker

Peter Drucker


The story of Peter Drucker is the story of modern management.. His teachings have formed a blueprint for most business leaders. By emphasising some fundamental principles like picking the best people and nurturing them, of concentrating on opportunities and not problems, of focusing on the customer, of understanding competitive advantages, and refining them, Drucker did more to advancing management as a practice, than anyone else.

Drucker’s early years certainly shaped his thinking. Born in Austria in 1909 into a highly educated family, Drucker grew up in Vienna, then a cultural and economic hub of Europe. As a student, a clerk in a Hamburg export firm, and a securities analyst in a Frankfurt merchant bank, he lived through the years of Hitler's emergence, recognizing early the menace of centralized power.

Drucker immigrated to London shortly after Hitler became Chancellor, taking a job as an economist at a London bank while continuing to write and to study economics. He moved to America in 1937 as a correspondent for a group of British newspapers.

Drucker was a professor of politics and philosophy at Bennington when he was given the opportunity to study General Motors in 1945. This assignment led to the publication of his groundbreaking book, Concept of the Corporation. In 1950, he started to teach at New York University's Graduate School of Business.

Drucker's most famous text, “The Practice of Management” was published in 1954. It became his first popular book about management. Drucker drove home the point that management was not a science or an art. It was a profession, like medicine or law.

Drucker can lay claim to being the first writer of modern times to enunciate clearly some of the basic principles of modern management:

• He introduced the idea of decentralization in the 1940s.
• He was the first to assert -- in the 1950s -- that workers should be treated as assets, not as liabilities to be eliminated.
• He originated the view of the corporation as a human community built on trust and respect for the worker and not just a profit-making machine.
• He was the first to make it clear that there was no business without a customer.
• He argued in the 1960s long before others for the importance of substance over style, for institutionalized practices over charismatic, cult leaders.
• He wrote about the contribution of knowledge workers in the 1970s long before anyone knew or understood how knowledge would drive the New Economy.

Drucker did not believe in giving CEOs clear, concise answers to their problems. Instead, he framed the questions that could uncover the larger issues standing in the way of performance. Shortly after Jack Welch became CEO of General Electric in 1981, Drucker posed two questions: "If you weren't already in a business, would you enter it today? And if the answer is no, what are you going to do about it?" These two questions drove GE’s corporate strategy under Welch’s leadership.

In the 1980s, Drucker developed serious doubts about business and capitalism itself. He saw companies increasingly becoming places where self-interest had triumphed over the egalitarian principles he had long championed. As he watched top management handing themselves fat compensation packages, even as they slashed the ranks of ordinary workers, Drucker became one of Corporate America's most important critics.

There has been some criticism of Drucker. Some contend that his work was not backed by rigorous research. Others have pointed out factual inaccuracies in some of his books. Notwithstanding this criticism, there is no doubt that Drucker’s contribution to the field of management has been both unprecedented and remarkable.