Life
Peter Ferdinand Drucker was born in 1909 in Vienna. He studied law in Frankfurt, where he obtained a doctorate. After Hitler came to power he left for London and then the USA. He taught at New York University among others, and from 1971 at Claremont Graduate University in California, whose management school now bears his name. In 2002 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He died in 2005.
Key ideas
- Management as a discipline - The Practice of Management (1954) introduced, among other things, management by objectives.
- Effectiveness - The Effective Executive (1967): effectiveness can be learned; it begins with managing one's time, focusing on contribution and building on strengths.
- The knowledge worker - Drucker was among the first to describe the role of people who work with their minds.
- Non-profit organisations - Managing the Non-Profit Organization (1990) and the Drucker Foundation founded that year (later the Leader to Leader Institute); Drucker held that social organisations and churches need good management precisely because they lack “profit” as a measure.
- Managing oneself - the essay Managing Oneself (1999); see self-leadership.
On leadership
Drucker was sceptical of the cult of charisma. He wrote that the only definition of a leader is someone who has followers (foreword to The Leader of the Future, 1996), and that leadership is above all responsibility and work, not privilege. See followership. The saying “managers do things right, leaders do the right things” is often attributed to him, but in that form it comes from Bennis and Nanus - see leadership and management.
Sources
P. F. Drucker, The Practice of Management, Harper 1954 P. F. Drucker, The Effective Executive, Harper & Row 1967 P. F. Drucker, Managing the Non-Profit Organization, HarperCollins 1990 P. F. Drucker, Managing Oneself, Harvard Business Review 1999 F. Hesselbein et al. (eds.), The Leader of the Future, Jossey-Bass 1996 Drucker Institute, Claremont Graduate University, drucker.institute