Developing a work approach that is adequate to the challenges ahead
a world moving toward new and different futureS
An introduction to Peter Drucker—the towering management leader
Why should you care? Because he's about our lives embedded in a changing world—maybe not the way we see it today, but how we may see it tomorrow. He's about not misdirecting decades of our lives—efforts and emotions. There's an old joke about the person who showed up at a gun fight with a knife—which is not adequate to the challenges ahead. He's about having a "real life"—a meaningful life—not just an inherited life. He's about liberating us. 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 and quote him out of context to prove a self-serving point.
If you want the benefit of his wisdom, read him for yourself; take structural 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
About Peter F. Drucker
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
See a combined outline of many of these books
Peter Drucker was first and foremost a writer. One of his "viewpoints" was that of a "social ecologist" (see Preface: Men, Ideas Politics and The Ecological Vision: Reflections on the American Condition for more info).
In "Reflections of a Social Ecologist," his unexpected term for what he is and does, Drucker says this about his writing: For the social ecologist language is doubly important. For language is itself social ecology. For the social ecologist language is not "communication." It is not just "message." It is substance. It is the cement that holds humanity together. It creates community and communion … Social ecologists need not be "great" writers; but they have to be respectful writers, caring writers. Respectful, caring, yes; but also stylish. Indeed, style is the open secret of the Drucker persuasion, his inimitable fusing of teaching with literary pleasure.
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 unwarrented towering reputation—too many opportunities for being proven ignorant, stupid, wrong or ineffective.
After over 30 years of reading from a wide variey 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," "postmodern' 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 sulphuric 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.
Introductory reading
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Who is Peter Drucker?
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Peter Drucker From Wikipedia (beware of limited viewpoints)
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His impact (161,000) on your plans (your life)
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The Essential Drucker (An introduction to management)
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What Executives Should Remember (a valuable summary of several core concepts)
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The Daily Drucker (an introduction to broad range of his thoughts)
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Contents of quite a few of his books (can be used as a work identification menu)
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Managing Knowledge Means Managing Oneself article (core preparation for working in today's and tomorrow's world). Managing Oneself (the book)
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The Next Society (structural clues to the world ahead)
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The X-economy—Peter Drucker on The X-Economy (a basic shift in the way we view the organization and the value chain; new executive skills—be many people; become information literate; start with results and price-lead costing).
Resources in this directory
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About Peter Drucker (this page)
- executive
- management
- mc21c
- pcs
See tables of contents for more book listings by Peter Drucker and others
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 be 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.