Peter Drucker

Biography

The son of a high level civil servant in the Habsburg empire, Drucker was born in a suburb of Vienna in a small village named Kaasgraben (nowadays part of the 19th district, Döbling). Following the defeat of Austria-Hungary in World War I, there were few opportunities for employment in Vienna so he went to Germany after finishing school, first working in banking and then in journalism. He also earned a doctorate in International Law while he was there.

The rise of Nazism forced him to leave Germany in 1933 and after four years in London he moved for good to the United States in 1937, where he became a professor as well as a freelance writer. According to George Orwell, he was one of the only writers to predict the German-Soviet Pact of 1939. In 1943, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States. He taught at New York University as Professor of Management from 1950 to 1971.

From 1971 to his death he was the Clarke Professor of Social Science and Management at Claremont Graduate University. He also unwittingly ushered in the knowledge economy and made famous the term knowledge worker, which effectively challenges Karl Marx's world-view of the political-economic landscape.

Business

His career as a business thinker took off in the 1945, when his initial writings on politics and society won him access to the internal workings of General Motors, which was 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. Brown invited him in to conduct what might be called a political audit. The resulting Concept of the Corporation popularized GM's multidivisional structure and led to numerous articles, consulting engagements, and additional books.

Drucker was interested in the growing importance of people who worked with their minds rather than their hands. He was intrigued by employees who know more about certain subjects than their bosses or colleagues and yet had to cooperate with others in a large organization. Rather than simply glorify the phenomenon as the epitome of human progress, Drucker analyzed it and explained how it challenged the common thinking about how organizations should be run.

His approach worked well in the increasingly mature business world of the second half of the twentieth century. By that time, large corporations had developed the basic manufacturing efficiencies and managerial hierarchies of mass production. Executives thought they knew how to run companies, and Drucker took it upon himself to poke holes in their beliefs, lest organizations become stale. But he did so in a sympathetic way. He assumed that his readers were intelligent, rational, hardworking people of goodwill. If their Organizations struggled, he believed it was usually because of outdated ideas, a narrow conception of problem, or internal misunderstandings.

Drucker is the author of thirty-nine books, which have been translated into more than twenty languages. Two of his books are novels, one an autobiography. He is the co-author of a book on Japanese painting, and has made four series of educational films on management topics. His first book was written in 1939, and from 1975 to 1995 was an editorial columnist for The Wall Street Journal, and was a frequent contributor to the Harvard Business Review. He continued to act as a consultant to businesses and non-profit organizations when he was in his nineties. Drucker died November 11, 2005 in Claremont, California of natural causes. He was 95.

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