Posted on 11/11/2005 1:18:23 PM PST by Borges
Peter Drucker, the most influential management writer of the modern era, has died age 95. A spokesman for the Claremont Graduate University in California, where Prof Drucker worked since the 1971, said he died peacefully on Friday morning after a short illness.
Prof Drucker remained active until the end of his life. Earlier this year he was honoured with the McKinsey Award for the best article published in the Harvard Business Review during 2004. He had just finished collaborating with colleagues on a reworking of the ideas contained in The Effective Executive, first published in 1966.
Peter Ferdinand Drucker was born in Vienna in 1909. He took a doctorate in public and international law while working as a newspaper reporter in Frankfurt, Germany, and then worked as an economist for an international bank in London. He moved to the US in 1937 and began his teaching career at Bennington College, New York. For more than twenty years he was professor of management at the graduate business school of New York University.
Prof Drucker’s first books considered what could be done to prevent a return of the economic and social conditions that led to the rise of Fascism. This led him to conclude that effective management of organizations – in both public and private sectors – was essential for social stability.
The Concept of the Corporation, a study of the management practices of General Motors, the first modern, multidivisional company, was published in 1946. This and later works helped establish management as a topic worthy of serious study. However, Prof Drucker always sought to combine academic erudition with a concern for the day to day problems faced by practicing managers. Of his 35 books, including two novels, 15 were concerned with management, including The Practice of Management, Managing in Turbulent Times and Management Challenges for the 21st Century, published in 1999.
Bless his heart, I had no idea he was still alive. What a full life!
One of the most brilliant men ever.
Useful terms, both of them. We read his stuff in management courses in college.
He died just over a week before his 96th birthday!
Good for him!
Shoot, I thought he was the guy that owned the store on Green Acres? /sarcasm.
God bless his family!
If you haven't read his books, they are masterpieces. Start with "The Effective Executive," a short book that incorporates issues of leadership and time management.
A grand and towering redwood has fallen.
Or a fine old gent passed on, depending on how poetic one's nature is :-).
Many of us have profited from Dr. Drucker's wisdom.
A great man - a tremendously influential business thinker. To the extent I have business "heroes", he was certainly one of them.
Famous too for "management by wandering around" and asking "dumb" questions. I used to use it to good effect as a company commander a generation ago.
Same here. I've used a lot of Drucker's work in my knowledge management research. Looks like he led a long, useful life.
I have to laugh when I think of him. When I was introduced to his work, the prof said that Drucker was famous, but not a scholar. "He writes in the practical literature. so you really don't want to quote him."
Yep, Sam Drucker.LOL!
Famous for "Drucker's Law," which said that a technology has to be 10 times more productive/effective to replace an existing technology (through combination of cost or performance). There is a great example of this with English longbows, which were far less effective, on average, than early gunpowder weapons, but which, in the hands of trained archers, were many times more effective. Thus, when archery practice declined, an inferior weapon quickly became superior due to training time and costs.
One of the most amazing things about Drucker is that he never lost his edge. He was always at the vanguard; his insights were never stale or dated.
"Work behavior is a function of the compensation system".
Did he say that, or was that Skinner?
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