Peter Drucker (1909–2005) economist

Peter Ferdinand Drucker was born in Vienna, Austria- Hungary, on November 19, 1909, the son of a prominent lawyer and civil servant. After receiving his secondary education in 1927, he pursued advanced studies at the Universities of Hamburg and Frankfurt, Germany. Because neither institution offered courses at night and Drucker was obliged to work by day, he completed his courses and passed his exams solely by reading texts on his own. Drucker ultimately received his doctorate in public and international law but opted to dabble in economics as an editor and financial writer. As such, he observed closely the failure of economic democracy in the Weimar Republic and the concomitant rise of political extremism. However, when Adolph Hitler became German chancellor in 1933, Drucker was offered a lucrative position within the Ministry of Information. He responded by composing a scathing pamphlet condemning Nazi excesses and fled the country for England. There he worked with an insurance firm as a securities analyst and also encountered the noted economist John Maynard KEYNES at a Cambridge University seminar. At this juncture Drucker decided to shift his expertise from economics to management. In 1937, he arrived in the United States as an economic correspondent for British financial newspapers. Two years later, he published his first book, The End of Economic Man, which was well received—and the first of 30 tomes to follow. Drucker decided to remain in the United States while World War II raged, and in 1943, he became a naturalized citizen.

It was as an observer at GENERAL MOTORS during the war years that Drucker made an indelible impact upon American managerial practices. His experiences there culminated in his most influential book, The Concept of a Corporation (1946). Here Drucker broke new ground intellectually by viewing the corporation as less of a business entity than a social one. He also posited that a new concept of management was necessary for the expanding corporate world and insisted that greater cooperation between labor and management was essential to extract maximum efficiency from the system. Most radical for its time was his notion that the assembly line was obsolete and that workers should receive greater autonomy and influence over daily routines. By virtue of challenging traditional tenets of managerial authority, his book became one of the most popular texts in business history. But Drucker nonetheless remained closely identified with the conservative school of economics, and he stridently defended profit making as the key ingredient of economic success. Moreover, he maintained that large profits were a better guarantor of full employment than the best-intended government planning. Corporations agreed with him wholeheartedly, and at one point he was on the payroll of more than 50 companies, advising them how to improve their management and business oversight.

Throughout the rest of his long career, Drucker became a much sought-after lecturer and instructor. By turns he held important economic chairs at Sarah Lawrence University, Bennington College, New York University, and the Claremont Graduate School. But Drucker always saw himself as more of a business philosopher than a practitioner, and he repeatedly declined invitations to head large corporations. In addition to business and management, he turned his eclectic interests to teaching such diverse topics as government, statistics, religion, and literature. He also became celebrated for invariably changing his teaching interests every three to four years and is further regarded as something of an authority on Japanese art. Even after his death on November 11, 2005, Drucker is still considered the most important managerial theorist of the 20th century and was a mentor to several generations of business leaders. Many of his 30 books have been translated into several languages and successfully sold around the world. He has also published long-running economic columns in numerous respected newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Inc., and the Harvard Business Review. But, most importantly, he is viewed as the single most important philosophical force behind modern management.

Further reading

Beatty, Jack. The World according to Peter Drucker. New York: Free Press, 1998.
Drucker, Peter. Adventures of a Bystander. New York: Harper & Row, 1979.
———. The Essential Drucker. New York: Harper- Collins, 2001.
Flaherty, John E. Peter Drucker: Shaping the Managerial Mind. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1999.
Schwartz, Michael D. “Peter Drucker’s Weimar Experience: Moral Management as a Perception of the Past.” Journal of Business Ethics (December 2002): 51–69.
Tarrant, John J. Drucker: The Man Who Invented Corporate Society. Boston: Cahners Books, 1976.

John C. Fredriksen