Peter Drucker

Peter Ferdinand Drucker (; German: [ˈdʁʊkɐ]; 19 November 1909 – 11 November 2005) was an Austrian American management consultant, educator, and author, whose writings contributed to the philosophical and practical foundations of modern management theory. He was also a leader in the development of management education, and contributed to the popularization of the concepts known as management by objectives and self-control, and he has been described as "the champion of management as a serious discipline".

Drucker's books and articles, both scholarly and popular, explored how humans are organized across the business, government, and 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-worker productivity to be the next frontier of management.

Drucker grew up 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, Austria, in the 19th district of Vienna-Döbling. He grew up in a home where intellectuals, high government officials, and scientists would meet to discuss new ideas. These included Joseph Schumpeter, Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. Hans Kelsen was his uncle.

After graduating from Döbling Gymnasium in 1927, Drucker found few opportunities for employment in post-World War I 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 Österreichische Volkswirt (The Austrian Economist). Drucker then moved to Frankfurt, where he took a job at the Daily Frankfurter General-Anzeiger. While in Frankfurt, he also earned a doctorate in international law and public law from the Goethe University Frankfurt in 1931.

In 1933, Drucker was a lecturer at Frankfurt when the Nazi regime took over. After the Nazi commissar appointed to oversee the university dismissed all the Jewish professors, Drucker left Germany within 48 hours for England. In London, he worked as a security analyst for an insurance company, then as the chief economist at a private bank. While in London, Drucker regularly attended John Maynard Keynes seminars at Cambridge University, discovering that he was interested in "the behaviour of people" while Keynes and other students focused on "the behaviour of commodities."

In 1937, Peter Drucker married Doris Schmitz, a classmate from the University of Frankfurt. The Druckers then moved to the U.S., where Peter Drucker became a freelance journalist writing for Harper's and The Washington Post. In 1939, Drucker joined Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York as a part-time economics instructor. Drucker was fired in 1941 after refusing to sign a faculty manifesto that he said "viciously and falsely attacked the liberal president of Brooklyn College, Harry Gideonse," who had supported the UK against Nazi Germany in the Battle of Britain. His 1939 book, The End of Economic Man, attracted attention of Bennington College president Lewis Webster Jones, who invited Drucker to lecture on the book. Despite some faculty objections, Jones hired Drucker as a professor of politics and philosophy at Bennington, a position Drucker would hold from 1942 to 1949. With the U.S. engaged in World War II, Drucker also became a consultant on international economic policy to the Board of Economic Warfare. In 1943, Drucker became a naturalized citizen of the United States.

Then from 1950 to 1971, Drucker was a professor of management at New York University. In 1954, Drucker wrote The Practice of Management, a book he set out to write after finding a lack of books specifically about business management at the General Electric library in Crotonville, New York. The Saturday Review and Business Week praised The Practice of Management as groundbreaking.

Among Drucker's early influences was the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, a friend of his father's, who impressed upon Drucker the idea of the importance of innovation and entrepreneurship. Drucker was also influenced, in a much different way, by John Maynard Keynes, whom he heard lecture in 1934 in Cambridge. "I suddenly realized that Keynes and all the brilliant economic students in the room were interested in the behaviour of commodities", Drucker wrote, "while I was interested in the behaviour of people".

Ultimately, his work drew from pioneering management consultant Mary Parker Follett.

Over the next 70 years, Drucker's writings would be marked by a focus on relationships among human beings, as opposed to the crunching of numbers. His books were filled with lessons on how organizations can bring out the best in people, and how workers can find a sense of community and dignity in a modern society organized around large institutions. As a business consultant, Drucker disliked the term "guru", though it was often applied to him; "I have been saying for many years", Drucker once remarked, "that we are using the word 'guru' only because 'charlatan' is too long to fit into a headline."

As a young writer, Drucker wrote two pieces – one on the conservative German philosopher Friedrich Julius Stahl and another called "The Jewish Question in Germany" – that were burned and banned by the Nazis. In 1939 he published a contemporary analysis of the rise of fascism called "The End of Economic Man". This was his first book, published in New York, in English. In the introduction he refers to "The Jewish Question in Germany" saying "An early excerpt [of this book] was published as a pamphlet by an Austrian Catholic and Anti-Nazi in ... 1936".

Drucker's career as a business thinker took off in 1942, when his initial writings on politics and society won him access to the internal workings of General Motors (GM), one of the largest companies in the world at that time. His experiences in Europe had left him fascinated with the problem of authority. He shared his fascination with Donaldson Brown, the mastermind behind the administrative controls at GM. In 1943 Brown invited him in to conduct what might be called a "political audit": a two-year social-scientific analysis of the corporation. Drucker attended every board meeting, interviewed employees, and analyzed production and decision-making processes.

Drucker was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by US President George W. Bush on July 9, 2002. He also received honors from the government of Austria, including the Grand Silver Medal for Services to the Republic of Austria in 1974, the Grand Gold Decoration for Services to the Republic of Austria in 1991 and the Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art, 1st class in 1999 and the Order of the Sacred Treasure, 3rd class; June 24, 1966, from the government of Japan.

Drucker was the Honorary Chairman of the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management, now the Leader to Leader Institute, from 1990 through 2002. In 1969 he was awarded New York University's highest honor, its Presidential Citation. For his article, "What Makes an Effective Executive", Harvard Business Review honored Drucker in the June 2004 with his seventh McKinsey Award – the most awarded to an individual. Drucker was inducted into the Junior Achievement US Business Hall of Fame in 1996. He received 25 honorary doctorates from American, Belgian, Czech, English, Spanish and Swiss universities. His 1954 book The Practice of Management was voted the third most influential management book of the 20th century in a poll of the Fellows of the Academy of Management. 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.

Drucker was posthumously honored when he was inducted into the Outsourcing Hall of Fame in recognition of his outstanding contributions in the field. In 2018, Drucker was named the world's most influential business thinker on the Thinkers50.com list.

At Claremont Graduate University, the Peter F. Drucker Graduate Management Center – now the Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management – was established in 1987 and continues to be guided by Drucker's principles.

The annual Global Peter Drucker Forum was first held in 2009, the centenary of Drucker's birth.

Peter Drucker married Doris Schmitz in 1937; they had four children. On 11 November 2005, Peter Drucker died of natural causes in Claremont, California, aged 95. Doris died in October 2014 at the age of 103.