An introduction to Peter Drucker—the towering management leader
Remembering Peter Drucker from the November 2009 issue of The Economist.
Everybody needs a coach and he's as good as it gets.
See Drucker's life as a knowledge worker and Peter's Principles for quick samples of his wisdom and insight—these contain crucial ideas for one's radar.
Caution: Don't take other people's word for what Peter Drucker said, wrote, or thought—they have their own agenda, own viewpoint, own history, and own mental patterns. They often quote him out of context to prove a self-serving point.
If you want the benefit of his wisdom, read him for yourself; take structured notes; convert those notes into daily action; revisit the original text and your notes; revise your action plan; and go to work. Repeat (long) before you think you need to. See concepts to daily action and conceptual resource digestion for a process overview.
His work is part of a foundation for future directed decisions. Try to look for the long-term value in his concepts and ideas.
About Peter F. Drucker
From the Foreword to The Daily Drucker by Jim Collins
… Drucker's primary contribution is not a single idea, but rather an entire body of work that has one gigantic advantage: nearly all of it is essentially right.
Drucker has an uncanny ability to develop insights about the workings of the social world, and to later be proved right by history.
His first book, The End of Economic Man, published in 1939, sought to explain the origins of totalitarianism; after the fall of France in 1940, Winston Churchill made it a required part of the book kit issued to every graduate of the British Officer's Candidate School.
His 1946 book The Concept of the Corporation analyzed the technocratic corporation, based upon an in-depth look at General Motors.
It so rattled senior management in its accurate foreshadowing of future challenges to the corporate state that it was essentially banned at GM during the Sloan era.
Drucker's 1964 book was so far ahead of its time in laying out the principles of corporate strategy that his publisher convinced him to abandon the title Business Strategies in favor of Managing for Results, because the term "strategy" was utterly foreign to the language of business.
There are two ways to change the world: with the pen (the use of ideas) and with the sword (the use of power).
Drucker chooses the pen, and has rewired the brains of thousands who carry the sword.
When in 1956 David Packard sat down to type out the objectives for the Hewlett-Packard Company, he'd been shaped by Drucker's writings, and very likely used The Practice of Management—which still stands as perhaps the most important management book ever written—as his guide.
In our research for the book Built to Last, Jerry Porras and I came across a number of great companies whose leaders had been shaped by Drucker's writings, including Merck, Procter & Gamble, Ford, General Electric, and Motorola.
Multiply this impact across thousands of organizations of all types—from police departments to symphony orchestras to government agencies and business corporations—and it is hard to escape the conclusion that Drucker is one of the most influential individuals of the twentieth century.
Peter F. Drucker—writer, management consultant, and university professor—was born in Vienna, Austria, November 19, 1909 and died in Claremont, California, on November 11, 2005.
After receiving his doctorate in public and international law from Frankfurt University in Frankfurt, Germany, he worked as an economist and journalist in London before moving to the United States in 1937.
Peter Drucker published his first book, The End of Economic Man, in 1939. He joined the faculty of New York University's Graduate Business School as professor of management in 1950. Since 1971, he had been Clarke Professor of Social Science and Management at the Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California. The university named its management school after him in 1987.
Peter Drucker wrote thirty-four major books in all: fifteen books deal with management, including the landmark books The Practice of Management and The Effective Executive: sixteen cover society, economics, and politics; two are novels; and one is a collection of autobiographical essays. His most recent book, The Effective Executive in Action, was published in fall 2005.
Peter Drucker also served as a regular columnist for The Wall Street Journal from 1975 to 1995 and contributed essays and articles to numerous publications, including the Harvard Business Review, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Economist. Throughout his sixty-five year career, he consulted with dozens of organizations across the world—ranging from the world's largest corporations to entrepreneurial start-ups and various government and nonprofit agencies.
Experts in the worlds of business and academia regard Peter Drucker as the founding father of the study of management.
For his accomplishments, Peter Drucker was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush on July 9, 2002. A documentary series about his life and work appeared on CNBC ten times from December 24, 2002, through January 3, 2003.
Above is quoted from Management, Revised Edition
Peter Drucker ::: political / social ecologist
… but the only thing that is "new" about political ecology is the name.
As a subject matter and human concern, it can boast ancient lineage, going back all the way to Herodotus and Thucydides.
It counts among its practitioners such eminent names as de Tocqueville and Walter Bagehot.
Its charter is Aristotle's famous definition of man as "zoon politikon," that is, social and political animal.
As Aristotle knew (though many who quote him do not), this implies that society, polity, and economy though man's creations, are nature to man, who cannot be understood apart from and out of them.
It also implies that society, polity and economy are a genuine environment, a genuine whole, a true "system," to use the fashionable term, in which everything relates to everything else and in which men, ideas, institutions, and actions must always be seen together in order to be seen at all, let alone to be understood.
Political ecologists are uncomfortable people to have around.
Their very trade makes them defy conventional classifications, whether of politics, of the market place, or of academia.
"Political ecologists" emphasize that every achievement exacts a price and, to the scandal of good "liberals"," talk of "risks" or "trade-offs," rather than of "progress."
But they also know that the man-made environment of society, polity, and economics, like the environment of nature itself, knows no balance except dynamic disequilibrium.
Political ecologists therefore emphasize that the way to conserve is purposeful innovation—and that hardly appeals to the "conservative."
Political ecologists believe that the traditional disciplines define fairly narrow and limited tools rather than meaningful and self-contained areas of knowledge, action, and events—in the same way in which the ecologists of the natural environment know that swamp or the desert is the reality and ornithology, botany, and geology only special-purpose tools.
Political ecologists therefore rarely stay put.
It would be difficult to say, I submit, which of chapters in this volume are "management," which "government" or "political theory," which "history" or "economics."
The task determines the tools to be used: but this has never been the approach of academia.
From analysis to perception — the new world view (task link coming later)
Students of man's various social dimensions—government, society, economy, institutions—traditionally assume their subject matter to be accessible to full rational understanding.
Indeed, they aim at finding "laws" capable of scientific proof.
Human action, however, they tend to treat as nonrational, that is, as determined by outside forces, such as their "laws."
The political ecologist, by contrast, assumes that his subject matter is far too complex ever to be fully understood—just as his counterpart, the natural ecologist, assumes this in respect to the natural environment.
But precisely for this reason the political ecologist will demand—like his counterpart in the natural sciences—responsible actions from man and accountability of the individual for the consequences, intended or otherwise, of his actions.
They aim at an understanding of the specific natural environment of man, his "political ecology," as a prerequisite to effective and responsible action, as an executive, as a policy-maker, as a teacher, and as a citizen.
Not one reader, I am reasonably sure, will agree with every essay; indeed, I expect some readers to disagree with all of them.
by bobembry: Carefully reading his writings is a time-investment — an opportunity to travel a brain-road and create a mental landscape (brainscape). Having the ability to revisit one of these provides a brain-address — a way back to a brainscape. In this case the brain-road is the mental terrain you covered during your reading. The brainscape is the entire topic landscape. Creating a brain-address will take a little thinking. Your collection of bookmarks is a set of brain-addresses. Which ones are truly valuable? Which ones will mean something ten years from now?
But then I long ago learned that the most serious mistakes are not being made as a result of wrong answers.
The truly dangerous thing is asking the wrong questions.
Men, Ideas & Politics
read more about social ecology
Peter Drucker also viewed himself as a bystander.
Others viewed him: As a Social and Management Theorist; Management Guru; Management Visionary; A man for the ages, as new as tomorrow; The Man Who Invented Management; an Intellectual Giant; Father of management; an organization consultant; political economist and author.
If a young Peter Drucker turned up today at a top-flight business school he would not be considered for an assistant professorship, let alone tenure. The most influential management thinker of the modern era refused to play the academic game.
In the words of Tom Peters: "Drucker effectively by-passed the intellectual establishment. So it's not surprising that they hated his guts.”
"He makes you think," Jack Welch, then-chairman of General Electric Co., told the magazine, while Intel co-founder Andrew Grove declared, "Drucker is a hero of mine. He writes and thinks with exquisite clarity—a standout among a bunch of muddled fad mongers."
"He would never give you an answer. That was frustrating for a while. But while it required a little more brain matter, it was enormously helpful to us. After you spent time with him, you really admired him not only for the quality of his thinking but for his foresight, which was amazing. He was way ahead of the curve on major trends."
Towering Reputations
Over a period a time, people in the public light acquire a reputation. It is very difficult (almost impossible) to retain an unwarranted towering reputation—too many opportunities for being proven ignorant, stupid, wrong or ineffective.
Tributes to Peter Drucker
After over 30 years of reading from a wide variety of sources only one name emerges as THE master (informed) wisdom source on how the world works or should work.
His work had, has, and will continue to have a global impact on our lives in ways that are probably not obvious or convenient. His thinking is relevant and it matters. His written work is repeatedly useful in helping "look out the windows" onto the world around us and seeing what's really there plus helping systematically focus our attention on important matters.
From The World According to Peter Drucker by Jack Beatty
THE PRESIDENT knew the man needed no introduction, so, without a word of identification, he simply told the employees of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare assembled to hear his speech: "Peter Drucker says that modern government can do only two things well: wage war and inflate the currency. It's the aim of my administration to prove Mr. Drucker wrong." If Richard Nixon thought he did not have to identify Peter Drucker thirty years ago, must I do it now? Drucker's fame is planetary. (The test of planetary is to have one of your novels be a best seller in Brazil.) According to a recent book on management gurus, Peter Drucker is "one of the few thinkers in any discipline who can claim to have changed the world: he is the inventor of privatization, the apostle of a new class of knowledge workers, the champion of management as a serious discipline." Drucker has been called everything from "the father of management" to "the man who changed the face of industrial America" to "the one great thinker management theory has produced." On inspection these and other encomia about him turn out to be within caviling distance of being true. This book attempts to show why.
Peter Drucker's influence is global: his twenty-nine books have sold over five million copies, and they have been translated into nearly every language in the world. His views on management, industrial organization, business strategy, leadership development, and employee motivation have tutored not just companies but countries—Drucker served as a guru to the postwar Japanese economic miracle—and he has an earned reputation for forecasting future social and economic trends. His concepts and coinages are the stuff of contemporary management thought; they include "privatization "the knowledge worker," "management by objectives," "post-modern and "discontinuity" as a principle to understand this era of vertiginous change. Drucker's ideas and books gain authority from his work as a management consultant; for fifty years he has immersed himself in the management challenges of Fortune 500 corporations, museums, charitable foundations, churches, hospitals, small businesses, universities, governments, and even baseball teams—Yogi Berra was once a client.
... snip, snip ...
the recurring paradox of Drucker's career: the "man who invented the corporate society" has been a sometimes sulfuric critic of capitalist excess. Indeed, Drucker, the author writes, should be seen as "a moralist of our business civilization"
See What do you want to be remembered for? and his bibliography.
Elizabeth Haas Edersheim wrote the following in The Definitive Drucker:
While interviewing former students and clients, I noticed a pattern. Virtually everyone I interviewed said, at some time in the interview, one version or another of essentially the same thing: "Peter liberated me. He elevated my expectations." I never really understood the power of liberation until I started hearing stories about it from so many people.
Peter's ideas were the catalyst that freed people to pursue opportunities they had never expected to have. He liberated people by asking them questions and eliciting a vision that just felt right. He liberated people by getting them to challenge their own assumptions. He liberated people by raising their awareness of, and their faith in, things they knew intuitively. He liberated people by forcing them to think. He liberated people by talking to them. He liberated people by getting them to ask the right questions.
When I played this theme back to Warren Bennis, a longtime friend of Peter's and one of today's leading thinkers on organizational effectiveness, he responded, "Yes, I had never thought of it that way, but Peter Drucker does liberate." Warren sat back in his living room chair and smiled. When I checked it with Richard Cavanagh, president of the Conference Board, he smiled and said, "Yes, I've seen him do that a lot. I've even seen him liberate whole audiences as he spoke."
A particularly poignant moment came when I was interviewing Tony Bonaparte, special assistant to the president at St. John's University in New York. With tears in his eyes, he looked at me and told me how Drucker had changed his career and his life. Bonaparte had always wanted to teach at a community college. He had a chance to attend the Executive MBA program at NYU. There he met Drucker, who was a professor and teaching an evening class. Drucker took an interest in him, and Peter and Doris started taking him out to dinner every few weeks. Drucker would ask questions and implore Bonaparte to push, push, push to liberate himself. "He made sure I always was stretching just a little further, liberating me from my constraints," Bonaparte remembered. "Each time I went back, my expectations of myself were higher. He would not let me do anything but succeed. And if it weren't for him I wouldn't be where I am today. He looks at things as they are with a very realistic sense of how they could be and helped me do the same. It changed my life."
Drucker worked with great leaders for over 75 years and liberated them, too. Churchill went so far as to say that the amazing thing about Peter Drucker was his ability to start our minds along a stimulating line of thought. Mexican President Vicente Fox commented that Peter's insights on societies were second to none. Peter Drucker so increased the credibility of the concept of "management" that the U.S. Bureau of the Budget was renamed the Office of Management and Budget in 1970. And, of course, Drucker liberated and inspired great corporate leaders, among them Akito Morita, founder of Sony; Andy Grove, one of the founders of Intel; Bill Gates of Microsoft; and Jack Welch, former chairman and chief executive of General Electric.
Peter Drucker's Legacy
From Jim Collins introductory remarks in Management, Revised Edition
During a discussion in graduate school, a professor challenged my first-year class: managers and leaders—are they different? The conversation unfolded something like this:
"Leaders set the vision; managers just figure out how to get there," said one student.
"Leaders inspire and motivate, whereas managers keep things organized," said another.
"Leaders elevate people to the highest values. Managers manage the details."
The discussion revealed an underlying worship of "leadership" and a disdain for "management." Leaders are inspired. Leaders are large. Leaders are the kids with black leather jackets, sunglasses, and sheer unadulterated cool. Managers, well, they're the somewhat nerdy kids, decidedly less interesting, lacking charisma. And of course, we all wanted to be leaders, and leave the drudgery of management to others.
We could not have been more misguided and juvenile in our thinking. As Peter Drucker shows right here, in these pages, the very best leaders are first and foremost effective managers. Those who seek to lead but fail to manage will become either irrelevant or dangerous, not only to their organizations, but to society.
Business and social entrepreneur Bob Buford once observed that Drucker contributed as much to the triumph of free society as any other individual. I agree. For free society to function we must have high-performing, self-governed institutions in every sector, not just in business, but equally in the social sectors. Without that, as Drucker himself pointed out, the only workable alternative is totalitarian tyranny. Strong institutions, in turn, depend directly on excellent management, and no individual had a greater impact on the practice of management and no single book captures its essence better than his seminal text, Management.
My first encounter with Drucker's impact came at Stanford in the early 1990s, when Jerry Porras and I researched the great corporations of the twentieth century. The more we dug into the formative stages and inflection points of companies like General Electric, Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble, Hewlett-Packard, Merck and Motorola, the more we saw Drucker's intellectual fingerprints. David Packard's notes and speeches from the foundation years at HP so mirrored Drucker's writings that I conjured an image of Packard giving management sermons with a classic Drucker text in hand. When we finished our research, Jerry and I struggled to name our book, rejecting more than 100 titles. Finally in frustration I blurted, Why don't we just name it Drucker Was Right, and we're done!" (We later named the book Built to Last.)
What accounts for Drucker's enormous impact? I believe the answer lies not just in his specific ideas, but in his entire approach to ideas, composed of four elements:
1. He looked out the window, not in the mirror
2. He started first—and always—with results
3. He asked audacious questions
4. He infused all his work with a concern and compassion for the individual.
I once had a conversation with a faculty colleague about the thinkers who had influenced us. I mentioned Drucker. My colleague wrinkled his nose, and said: "Drucker? But he's so practical." Drucker would have loved that moment of disdain, reveling in being criticized for the fact that his ideas worked. They worked because he derived them by precise observation of empirical facts. He pushed always to look out there, in the world, to derive ideas, challenging himself and his students to "Look out the window, not in the mirror!" Drucker falls in line with thinkers like Darwin, Freud and Taylor—empiricists all. Darwin wrote copious notebooks, pages and pages about pigeons and turtles. Freud used his therapeutic practice as a laboratory. Taylor conducted empirical experiments, systematically tracking thousands of details. Like them, Drucker immersed himself in empirical acts and then asked, "What underlying principle explains these facts, and how can we harness that principle?"
Drucker belonged to the church of results. Instead of starting with an almost religious belief in a particular category of answers—a belief in leadership, or culture, or information, or innovation, or decentralization, or marketing, or strategy, or any other category—Drucker began first with the question "what accounts for superior results?" and then derived answers. He started with the outputs—the definitions and markers of success—and worked to discover the inputs, not the other way around. And then he preached the religion of results to his students and clients, not just to business corporations but equally to government and the social sectors. The more noble your mission, the more he demanded: what will define superior performance? "Good intentions," he would seemingly yell without ever raising his voice, "are no excuse for incompetence."
And yet while practical and empirical, Drucker never became technical or trivial, nor did he succumb to the trend in modern academia to answer (in the words of the late John Gardner) "questions of increasing irrelevance with increasing precision." By remaining a professor of management—not as a science, but as a liberal art he gave himself the freedom to pursue audacious questions. My first reading of Drucker came on vacation in Monterey, California. My wife and I embarked on one of our adventure walks through a used book store, treasure hunting for unexpected gems. I came across a beaten-up, dog-eared copy of Concept of the Corporation, expecting a tutorial on how to build a company. But within a few pages, I realized that it asked a much bigger question: what is the proper role of the corporation at this stage of civilization? Drucker had been invited to observe General Motors from the inside, and the more he saw, the more disturbed he became. "General Motors … can be seen as the triumph and the failure of the technocrat manager," he later wrote. "In terms of sales and profits [GM) has succeeded admirably … But it has also failed abysmally—in terms of public reputation, of public esteem, of acceptance by the public." Drucker passionately believed in management not as a technocratic exercise, but as a profession with a noble calling, just like the very best of medicine and law.
Drucker could be acerbic and impatient, a curmudgeon. But behind the prickly surface, and behind every page in his works, stands a man with tremendous compassion for the individual. He sought not just to make our economy more productive, but to make all of society more productive and more humane. To view other human beings as merely a means to an end, rather than as ends in themselves, struck Drucker as profoundly immoral. And as much as he wrote about institutions and society, I believe that he cared most deeply about the individual.
I personally experienced Drucker's concern and compassion in 1994, when I found myself at a crossroads, trying to decide whether to jettison a traditional path in favor of carving my own. I mentioned to an editor for Industry Week that I admired Peter Drucker. "I recently interviewed Peter," he said, "and I'd be happy to ask if he'd be willing to spend some time with you."
I never expected anything to come of it, but one day I got a message on my answering machine. "This is Peter Drucker"—slow, deliberate, in an Austrian accent—"I would be very pleased to spend a day with you, Mr. Collins. Please give me a call." We set a date for December, and I flew to Claremont, California. Drucker welcomed me into his home, enveloping my extended hand into two of his. "Mr. Collins, so very pleased to meet you. Please come inside." He invested the better part of a day sitting in his favorite wicker chair, asking questions, teaching, guiding, and challenging. I made a pilgrimage to Claremont seeking wisdom from the greatest management thinker, and I came away feeling that I'd met a compassionate and generous human being who—almost as a side benefit—was a prolific genius.
There are two ways to change the world: the pen (the use of ideas) and the sword (the use of power). Drucker chose the pen, and thereby rewired the brains of thousands who carry the sword. Those who choose the pen have an advantage over those who wield the sword: the written word never dies. If you never had the privilege to meet Peter Drucker during his lifetime, you can get to know him in these pages. You can converse with him. You can write notes to him in the margins. You can argue with him, be irritated by him, and inspired. He can mentor you, if you let him, teach you, challenge you, change you—and through you, the world you touch. (calendarize this)
Peter Drucker shined a light in a dark and chaotic world, and his words remain as relevant today as when he banged them out on his cranky typewriter decades ago. They deserve to be read by every person of responsibility, now, tomorrow, ten years from now, fifty and a hundred. That free society triumphed in the twentieth century guarantees nothing about its triumph in the twenty-first; centralized tyranny remains a potent rival, and the weight of history is not on our side. When young people ask, 'What can I do to make a difference?" one of the best answers lies right here in this book. Get your hands on an organization aligned with your passion, if not in business, then in the social sectors. If you can't find one, start one. And then lead it—through the practice of management—to deliver extraordinary results and to make such a distinctive impact that you multiply your own impact by a thousand-fold.
Jim Collins
Boulder, Colorado
December, 2007
Introductory reading
Examples of Drucker's Writing and Thinking
Peter Drucker: Conceptual Resources
about Peter Drucker — a political social ecologist
Combined outline of Drucker's books — useful for topic searching.
Process: find topic; get Kindle version; word search; dictate notes to voice recognition software (Dragon NS or smart phone); calendarize
Invent Radium or I'll Pull Your Hair by Doris Drucker
Most of the following contain interesting introductions and prefaces with key strategic concepts. Reading through a book's index is a valuable use of time.
Toward tomorrows
Toward unimagined futures
 The End of Economic Man: The Origins of Totalitarianism (1939)
The Future of Industrial Man (1943)
The New Society: The Anatomy of Industrial Order (1950)
Landmarks of Tomorrow (1957)
The Age of Discontinuity (1968)
The New Realities (1988)
Post-Capitalist Society (1993)
Managing in the Next Society (2002); Last section originally published earlier in The Economist (http://economist.com/surveys/displaystory.cfm?story_id=770819)
Comprehensive Management Books
Concept of the Corporation
Practice of Management
Managing for Results
Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices
Innovation and Entrepreneurship
The Essential Drucker (An introduction to management)
Managing the Non-Profit Organization
Management, Revised Edition
Management Cases (Revised Edition)
The Five Most Important Questions You Will Ever Ask About Your Organization
“Time Related” Management Books
Managing in Turbulent Times
The Changing World of The Executive
Frontiers of Management
Managing for the Future
Managing in a Time of Great Change
Management Challenges for the 21st Century
Managing in the Next Society
Individually Aimed Books by Drucker
Managing Oneself
The Effective Executive
The Effective Executive in Action
What Executives Should Remember (a valuable summary of several core concepts)
The Daily Drucker (an introduction to broad range of his thoughts)
The Daily Drucker table of contents worksheet
Drucker on Asia — A Dialogue Between Peter Drucker and Isao Nakauchi
Adventures of a Bystander
Books about Drucker and his ideas
The Definitive Drucker
Inside Drucker's Brain
A Class With Drucker: The Lost Lessons of the World's Greatest Management Teacher
Drucker on Leadership: New Lessons from the Father of Modern Management
The Drucker Lectures: Essential Lessons on Management, Society, and Economy
The Drucker Difference
Drucker Essay Collections
Although written years ago, these essays can be valuable attention directing tools. They can take your brain to places (brain addresses and brain roads) it wouldn't naturally go. What has changed and what is likely to change?
Technology, Management and Society
Men, Ideas & Politics
Toward the Next Economics and Other Essays
The Ecological Vision: Reflections on the American Condition
See a combined outline of many of these books
It would probably be informative to contrast and compare the subject and contents of his work with the course outlines of the prominent business (management) schools (Google: recruiter OR recruiters "top business schools"). My perception of the difference: the schools focus on tools and tool boxes while Peter Drucker focuses on what works—from a broad strategic viewpoint—in TIME. Tools are valuable to the extent that they serve a desired end.
It has been noted that hyperbole is often present in Peter Drucker's work. I believe he used it as a device for focusing attention. Our brains tend to dismiss ideas cloaked in cautious language.
TLN keywords: tlnkwdrucker tlnkwmanagement
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for topics or phrases.