Peter Drucker
Peter Drucker
Peter Drucker
Peter Ferdinand Drucker was an influential writer, management consultant, and self-described social ecologist.
By Vasishnav
Introduction
Drucker's books and scholarly and popular articles explored how humans are organized across the business, government and the nonprofit sectors of society. He is one of the best-known and most widely influential thinkers and writers on the subject of management theory and practice. His writings have predicted many of the major developments of the late twentieth century, including privatization and decentralization; the rise of Japan to economic world power; the decisive importance of marketing; and the emergence of the information society with its necessity of lifelong learning. In 1959, Drucker coined the term knowledge worker" and later in his life considered knowledge work productivity to be the next frontier of management. The annual Global Peter Drucker Forum in his hometown of Vienna Austria, honors his legacy.
Biography
Life
Drucker was both on his paternal and his maternal side of Jewish descent, but his parents converted to Christianity and lived in what he referred to as a "liberal" Lutheran Protestant household in Austria-Hungary. His mother Caroline Bondi had studied medicine and his father Adolf Drucker was a lawyer and high-level civil servant. Drucker was born in Vienna, the capital of Austria, in a small village named Kaasgraben (now part of the 19th district of Vienna, Dbling). He grew up in a home where intellectuals, high government officials, and scientists would meet to discuss new ideas After graduating from Dbling Gymnasium, Drucker found few opportunities for employment in post-World War Vienna, so he moved to Hamburg, Germany, first working as an apprentice at an established cotton trading company, then as a journalist, writing for Der sterreichische Volkswirt (The Austrian Economist). Drucker then moved to Frankfurt, where he took a job at the DailyFrankfurter General-Anzeiger. While in Frankfurt, he also earned a doctorate in international law and public law from the University of Frankfurt in 1931
In 1933, Drucker left Germany for England. In London, he worked for an insurance company, then as the chief economist at a private bank. He also reconnected with Doris Schmitz, an acquaintance from the University of Frankfurt whom he married in 1934. The couple permanently relocated to the United States, where he became a university professor as well as a free-lance writer and business consultant.
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Life
In 1943, Drucker became a naturalized citizen of the United States. He then had a distinguished career as a teacher, first as a professor of politics and philosophy at Bennington College from 19421949, then for more than twenty years at New York University as a Professor of Management from 1950 to 1971. Drucker came to California in 1971, where he developed one of the country's first executive MBA programs for working professionals at Claremont Graduate University (then known as Claremont Graduate School). From 1971 to his death he was the Clarke Professor of Social Science and Management at Claremont Graduate University. Claremont Graduate University's management school was named the "Peter F. Drucker Graduate School of Management" in his honor in 1987 (later renamed the "Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management"). He taught his last class there in 2002 at age 92. Drucker also continued to act as a consultant to businesses and non-profit organizations well into his nineties. He died November 11, 2005 in Claremont, California of natural causes at 95
Family
In 1934 Drucker married Doris Schmitz, an acquaintance from the University of Frankfurt. Their wedding certificate lists his name as Peter Georg Drucker. They had four children and six grandchildren and lived in Claremont, California
Consulting career
During his long consulting career, Drucker worked with many major corporations, including General Electric, Coca-Cola, Citicorp, IBM, and Intel. He consulted with notable business leaders such as GEs Jack Welch; Procter & Gambles A.G. Lafley; Intels Andy Grove; Edward Jones John Bachmann; Shoichiro Toyoda, the honorary chairman of Toyota Motor Corp.; and Masatoshi Ito, the honorary chairman of the Ito-Yokado Group, the second largest retailing organization in the world. Although he helped many corporate executives succeed, he was appalled when the level of Fortune 500 CEO pay in America ballooned to hundreds of times that of the average worker. He argued in a 1984 essay that CEO compensation should be no more than 20 times what the rank and file make especially at companies where thousands of employees are being laid off. This is morally and socially unforgivable, Drucker wrote, and we will pay a heavy price for it. Drucker served as a consultant for various government agencies in the United States, Canada and Japan. He worked with various nonprofit organizations to help them become successful, often consulting pro bono. Among the many social-sector groups he advised were the Salvation Army, the Girl Scouts of the USA, C.A.R.E., the American Red Cross, and the Navajo Indian Tribal Council
Drucker's writings
Drucker's 39 books have been translated into more than thirty languages. Two are novels, one an autobiography. He is the co-author of a book on Japanese painting, and made eight series of educational films on management topics. He also penned a regular column in the Wall Street Journal for 10 years and contributed frequently to the Harvard Business Review, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Economist. His work is especially popular in Japan, even more so after the publication of "What If the Female Manager of a High-School Baseball Team Read Druckers Management", a novel that features the main character using one of his books to great effect, which was also adapted into an anime and a live action film. His popularity in Japan may be compared with that of his contemporary W. Edwards Deming. Peter Drucker also wrote a book in 2001 called "The Essential Drucker". It is the first volume and combination of the past sixteen years of Peter Drucker's work on management. The information gather is a collection from his previous findings, The Practice of Management (1954)to Management Challenges for the 21st Century(1999), this book offers, in Drucker's words, " a coherent and fairly comprehensive introduction to management". He also answers frequently asked questions from up and coming entrepreneurs who wonder the questionable outcomes of management.
Awards
Drucker was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by U.S. President George W. Bush on July 9, 2002 In 1969 he was awarded New York Universitys highest honor, the NYU Presidential Citation. Drucker was inducted into the Junior Achievement U.S. Business Hall of Fame in 1996
Honors
Governments of Japan and Austria. Chairman of the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management, now the Leader to Leader Institute, from 1990 through 2002. Harvard Business Review honored Drucker in the June 2004 with his seventh McKinsey Award for his article, "What Makes an Effective Executive", the most awarded to one person Additionally he holds 25 honorary doctorates from American, Belgian, Czech, English, Spanish and Swiss Universities In Claremont, California, Eleventh Street between College Avenue and Dartmouth Avenue was renamed "Drucker Way" in October 2009 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Drucker's birth
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