Peter Drucker, business management guru

WASHINGTON – Peter Drucker, the business management visionary whose humanist ideas deeply shaped the way the modern corporation is run, died earlier this month.

He was 95. Known as “the father of modern management” and the creator of corporate society, Drucker was born in Vienna, Austria in 1909.He earned a doctorate in public and international law from Frankfurt University in Germany, and later joined a local newspaper as a financial reporter.In 1933, he fled the rising Nazi fascism for London, where he worked for an insurance company, married and wrote his first book, ‘The End of Economic Man’, a widely respected examination of the roots of fascism.It was the first of 35 books, including the landmark ‘The Concept of the Corporation’ (1946), ‘The Practice of Management’ (1954) and ‘The Effective Executive’ (1964), which became standards in the world’s leading business management schools.In ‘The Concept of the Corporation’, which Drucker wrote after a pioneering study of General Motors, he crafted the basis of his analysis of company management.He emphasised that, rather than being a machine, the modern corporation was an organisation of human beings whose management and interaction are crucial to the business’s success.The book advocated then-radical concepts like management decentralisation and motivating workers by making them feel they have a stake in the company.That and subsequent books garnered Drucker a reputation as a “futurist” in the business world, a person who read before anyone else the trends and needs of business and the economy.But he preferred to call himself a “social ecologist” whose focus was the people in the corporate environment, not the business itself.It made him by far the world’s most influential management expert, even though he himself never ran a big business.Drucker spent his life teaching, writing and consulting on business management.He was a professor at New York University’s Graduate Business School from 1950 to 1971.He then moved to California, where he helped establish the Claremont Graduate University, the United States’ first executive Masters of Business Administration programme for working managers.He taught at the school until 2002 and continued to consult and write until he died.Drucker was a columnist for the Wall Street Journal for 20 years, until 1995, and wrote regularly for the Economist, Atlantic and the Harvard Business Review.He continued to analyse and influence business trends up to his death.In 2002, he published ‘Managing in the Next Society’, and his ‘The Daily Drucker’, a collection of his thinking, was on Business Week’s business best-seller list earlier this year.He also co-authored a new book on management scheduled to be published early next year.- Nampa-AFPKnown as “the father of modern management” and the creator of corporate society, Drucker was born in Vienna, Austria in 1909.He earned a doctorate in public and international law from Frankfurt University in Germany, and later joined a local newspaper as a financial reporter.In 1933, he fled the rising Nazi fascism for London, where he worked for an insurance company, married and wrote his first book, ‘The End of Economic Man’, a widely respected examination of the roots of fascism.It was the first of 35 books, including the landmark ‘The Concept of the Corporation’ (1946), ‘The Practice of Management’ (1954) and ‘The Effective Executive’ (1964), which became standards in the world’s leading business management schools.In ‘The Concept of the Corporation’, which Drucker wrote after a pioneering study of General Motors, he crafted the basis of his analysis of company management.He emphasised that, rather than being a machine, the modern corporation was an organisation of human beings whose management and interaction are crucial to the business’s success.The book advocated then-radical concepts like management decentralisation and motivating workers by making them feel they have a stake in the company.That and subsequent books garnered Drucker a reputation as a “futurist” in the business world, a person who read before anyone else the trends and needs of business and the economy.But he preferred to call himself a “social ecologist” whose focus was the people in the corporate environment, not the business itself.It made him by far the world’s most influential management expert, even though he himself never ran a big business.Drucker spent his life teaching, writing and consulting on business management.He was a professor at New York University’s Graduate Business School from 1950 to 1971.He then moved to California, where he helped establish the Claremont Graduate University, the United States’ first executive Masters of Business Administration programme for working managers.He taught at the school until 2002 and continued to consult and write until he died.Drucker was a columnist for the Wall Street Journal for 20 years, until 1995, and wrote regularly for the Economist, Atlantic and the Harvard Business Review.He continued to analyse and influence business trends up to his death.In 2002, he published ‘Managing in the Next Society’, and his ‘The Daily Drucker’, a collection of his thinking, was on Business Week’s business best-seller list earlier this year.He also co-authored a new book on management scheduled to be published early next year.- Nampa-AFP

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