Drucker, Peter F.

1909—

Management Theorist

Peter Drucker is the most influential management and business writer of the twentieth century. His 1946 book, The Concept of the Corporation, was a classic in the true sense of the word: It established a new class of book while redefining business administration as one aspect of a larger framework.

Born in Austria in 1909, Drucker earned a doctorate in public law and international relations at Frankfurt University while working full-time as financial writer and senior editor of Frankfurt's largest daily newspaper. He moved to London to spend five years in merchant banking while writing for European and American periodicals. In the late 1930s, he moved to America to begin a long career as a writer, consultant, and teacher. Still active in his nineties, he has published more than 30 books with over six million copies sold. Most are still in print.

Drucker revolutionized the management field, which he defined as “the organized, systematic study of the structure, the policies, and the social and human concerns of the modern organization,” with a series of powerful distinctions resting on two central insights. The first was that management is more than just administration. A social innovation of the twentieth [Page 156]century, management is a specific kind of work, a practice enabling groups to become effective, purposeful, and productive. Management has two specific tasks. The first task is creating wholes that are larger than the sum of their parts—that is, helping organizations produce more than the sum of the resources fed into them. The second task is balancing the immediate and long-term future of the organization in actions that manage the organization, its managers, its workers, and their work. Drucker's second insight was that ours is a society of organizations, public and private. Managers form a professional class serving social needs.

Drucker developed these insights while studying General Motors in preparation for The Concept of the Corporation. When he started the book, he was launched on a promising academic career in economics and political science; when he finished, he was warned that his view of the modern organization would offend both economists and political scientists—and it did, at least initially.

Since 1946, Drucker has examined all the major aspects of social life in the industrial world. His work links a broad knowledge of history to a focused sense of time and circumstance. He examines the social effects and vital linkages of current trends, bringing historical, political, and economic facts together with an encyclopedic knowledge of current events and technology. Drucker's ability to understand emerging developments rests on a deep understanding of the ways that technology affects society.

Drucker has consistently been among the first to identify and articulate important trends. In the 1950s, he coined the term “knowledge workers,” in one of the first books to report on the idea of a post-modern world. By the 1970s, he identified such central trends of our time as globalization, post-industrial society, the knowledge economy, the knowledge society, and many others. While many see the phenomena that Drucker describes, he draws profound conclusions by analyzing the consequences to which they lead.

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