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Who was Peter Drucker?
Drucker's childhood and youth in Vienna
Peter F. Drucker was born in Vienna on November 19, 1909 in Vienna, when the city was still the vibrant centre of the Habsburg monarchy. He grew up in Kaasgrabengasse, a tranquil avenue in the Viennese suburb of Döbling. His father Adolph was a high government official, his "strong-willed, argumentative and independent" mother Caroline, a former medicine student with an interest in psychiatry, ran the household. Peter and his younger brother Gerhard were surrounded by their adored Grandmother and by any number of uncles and cousins and family friends who were university professors - in law, in economics, medicine, chemistry, biology, art history and music. The Druckers lived in a semi-detached house designed by renowned architect Josef Hoffmann, shared by the family of the music historian and composer Egon Wellesz who belonged to the intimate circle of the poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Two or three times a week Drucker's parents hosted soirées at their home. State officials, lawyers, doctors, psychologists, scientists and philosophers met there for dinner and debated all sorts of hot topics - from economics to psychoanalysis. Already at an early age, Peter was allowed to participate. "That was actually my education", he states later. Regular guests of the Druckers included the economists Schumpeter, Hayek and Mises, with whom Drucker's father had professional relations in his function as director of the K. & K. Commercial Museum (the forerunner of what would later become the Austrian Ministry of Economics). Hans Kelsen, who was married to the youngest sister of Drucker's mother, practically belonged to the family, even if Peter Drucker did not have a very good relationship to him: "I couldn't stand the ultra-rationality of my Uncle Hans." More cordial were Drucker's father's relations with the Czech top politicians Tomas and Jan Masaryk, who were also regular visitors. In his book "Adventures of a Bystander" Peter Drucker describes his early years in Vienna, the cultural and intellectual environment in which he was brought up by venue of the individuals who fascinated him in the way they reflected their society: his Grandmother, Dr. Eugenia and Dr. Hermann Schwarzwald, amongst many others. Drucker's parents belonged to the "Schwarzwald Circle" around the social reformer Eugenia "Genia" Schwarzwald. She came from the far end of Austrian Poland to the University of Zurich, graduated with the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in 1900, and made it straight to Vienna, determined to raise the flag for equal education for girls: Genia opened a college-preparatory girl's school, than the first full-scale women's Gymnasium in Austria. She also set up the first coeducational primary school in Austria, which Peter Drucker attended in fourth grade. His two classroom teachers were able to pass on to him lifelong lessons: "I took from Miss Sophy a lifelong appreciation for craftsmanship.. and respect for the task…". "And Miss Elsa had given me a work discipline and the knowledge of how one organizes for performance". When the famine years hit Genia also organized co-op restaurants ("Gemeinschaftsküchen") and it was at the co-op restaurant at Thurngasse 4 (near Berggasse) where the eight or nine years old Peter was asked by his parents to shake hands with "the most important man in Austria and perhaps in Europe"- Dr. Freud. Genia also ran and managed a very puzzling, talk show like Salon in her home in Vienna and up from the 1920s in her recreation resort, the summer villa "Seeblick" in Grundlsee, (on the Alpine lake Grundlsee in Styria, near the Freuds summer villa). She invited "guest stars" such as Thomas Mann and "fixed stars" such as Count Hellmuth Moltke (who in the Third Reich would become the wisest and most visionary head of the German resistance). She also invited guests whose job was to listen and to ask the right questions, mostly university professors, such as Ludwig Rademacher, who rebuilt the University of Vienna after World War II, and their wives. Peter was not only admitted to the Salons since he was a teenager, but also encouraged to speak out.
Apprenticeship in Hamburg
Austria of the inter-war period offered Drucker a good education, but no perspectives, and in 1927, after graduating from the Döbling Gymnasium, he left for Hamburg to complete a one-year apprenticeship at an old-established trading company. Along with Drucker, seven other Gymnasium graduates began their merchant's apprenticeships - a novelty for the company, which specialized in the export of cotton, as until then, positions within the business had been inherited. The managing director, "Herr Simonis, the Twelfth" however, did not think much of this innovation and took little care of the trainees:
"We learned nothing, absolutely nothing. It was terribly boring." Yet he does not consider his time in Hamburg a lost year: "I read a lot - novels and history, especially nineteenth century. Also a lot of English, French, Spanish, and Italian literature." And he discovered the work of the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard, who would have a lasting influence on him.
Peter Drucker As Journalist
Peter Drucker's first journalistic attempts were also made at this time. He began writing his first articles, such as for Der Österreichische Volkswirt (The Austrian Economist). Moreover, though more as a gesture to his father that out of his own interest, he began his studies of law, which he continued after moving to Frankfurt the following year. In Frankfurt he found a post at the daily Frankfurter General-Anzeiger, a regional rival newspaper to the famous Frankfurter Zeitung.
The Frankfurter General-Anzeiger, which according to its own definition was "by far [the] most read daily newspaper and most-used advertising organ in Frankfurt a.M. and the Rhine-Main economic area" had a circulation of half a million and an editorial staff of fourteen people. The generation before him had remained in the trenches of the First World War so that Peter Drucker quickly rose to a position as one of the three main editors.
He was primarily responsible for the foreign affairs and economic departments, but in practice, all of the editors were, under editor-in-chief Erich Dombrowski, responsible for all of the departments. When there was a shortage of personnel, Drucker also had to attend to the music and women's departments. Or he visited the mass rallies of the political parties for his newspaper, or went to press conferences "if a Brüning or Hitler came to Frankfurt."
As a journalist, Peter Drucker experienced firsthand the crises and decline of the Weimar Republic. He had no illusions about the intentions and danger of the National Socialists - in contrast to many others he took Hitler and his statements seriously.
Drucker's emigration to England
Immediately after Hitler took power in 1933 Drucker left Germany for London, where he found work first as a trainee with an insurance company, and then as chief economist of a private bank. Through the director of the bank, who was also from Austria, Drucker secured in 1934/35 a place in the legendary seminar of John Maynard Keynes in Cambridge, which he remembers as a theatrical one-man show.
In London Drucker reconnected with Doris Schmitz, born in Mainz, whom he had gotten to know at his international law seminar at the University of Frankfurt. They married in 1934.
Already immediately after the takeover of the National Socialists, Drucker began to record and analyse the experiences he had in Germany. In 1936 a first version was published with a Viennese publisher; then, in the spring of 1939, Drucker's analysis appeared in an enlarged edition and in English, with the title The End of Economic Man.
Drucker's analysis met with a broad and positive response, including from Winston Churchill, who praised the book and its author in the Times Literary Supplement. Hayek, in his own analysis of totalitarianism, The Road to Serfdom, referred in two places to Drucker's book.
How Drucker 'invented' management at GM Already in 1937, Drucker had emigrated to the USA, where he worked first as a free-lance journalist, chiefly for Harper's, but also for the Washington Post. At the beginning of the forties, he also began teaching political science and philosophy at Bennington College in Vermont.
At this time, Drucker also began his activities as a business consultant: In 1942, in his book The Future of Industrial Man, he had dealt with the development of society in the twentieth century and had come to the conclusion that the society of industrialized states had been transformed into a "society of organizations."
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Peter Drucker: The Father of Management Theory His legacy thrives in the commonplace and the extraordinary.
Drucker, the man who invented management theory, put great currency in listening, asking questions and letting natural patterns emerge from the answers.
The author of 39 books during his long career, and counselor to titans of business and rulers of nations, Drucker championed the powers of observation, often formulating simple ideas that triggered startling results. The Practice of Management (1954) and The Effective Executive (1966) are considered his landmark works. Part of Drucker’s genius lay in his ability to find patterns among seemingly unconnected disciplines. “The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said,” he once said.
“Whether it’s recognized or not, the organization and practice of management today is derived largely from the thinking of Peter Drucker,” BusinessWeek reported shortly after his death at 95 in 2005. “What John Maynard Keynes is to economics or W. Edwards Deming to quality, Drucker is to management.”
The magazine called Drucker’s teachings “a blueprint for every thinking leader,” noting that Drucker taught generations of managers the importance of picking the best people, of focusing on opportunities and not problems, of getting on the same side of the desk as their customer, of the need to understand their competitive advantages and to continue to refine them.
During the inaugural Peter Drucker Forum in Vienna celebrating Drucker’s 100th birthday in 2009, Rick Warren, author of The Purpose Driven Life and founding pastor of the Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif., talked about his mentor’s breadth of influence.
“I’m often embarrassed at how often I quote Peter Drucker,” Warren said. “He had a way of saying things simply. Peter was far more than the founder of modern management, far more than a brilliant man, one of the greatest minds of the 20th century. He was a great soul. If I summed up Peter’s life in three words, it would be integrity, humility and generosity.... Peter was the only truly Renaissance man I’ve ever known. He had a way of looking at the world in a systems view that said it all matters.”
High-Octane Testimonials
Many of Drucker’s notions might be considered common sense today, but they broke considerable new ground when he first started studying and writing about them in the 1940s. His work, and personal contact, shaped the thinking of the top management minds in the world.
“He was the creator and inventor of modern management,” management expert Tom Peters told Newsweek in 2005. “In the early 1950s, nobody had a tool kit to manage these incredibly complex organizations that had gone out of control. Drucker was the first person to give us a handbook for that.”
Drucker, born in Austria in 1909, gained his first experience in this listening-and-learning approach from his parents, Adolph and Caroline, highly educated professionals who reveled in inviting cadres of intellectually stimulating characters into their Vienna home for broad discourses on medicine, politics and music.
Drucker earned a doctorate in public and international law from Frankfurt University in Frankfurt, Germany. He toiled as an economist and journalist in London before moving in 1937 to the United States as a correspondent for the Financial Times , along with his new wife, the former Doris Schmitz, whom he had met in Frankfurt and married in London.
Making His Mark Drucker’s first book, The End of Economic Man , published in 1939, attracted the enthusiastic praise of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. That same year, he began teaching part time at Sarah Lawrence College and, in 1942, joined the faculty at Bennington College in Vermont. While at Bennington, Drucker got the chance to study General Motors Corp., which led to his groundbreaking book, Concept of the Corporation. In 1950, he joined the faculty of New York University’s Graduate Business School as professor of management.
He moved to California in 1971 as the Clarke Professor of Social Science and Management at the Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, Calif., where he taught for 30 years. During that time, the Druckers received corporate and social-sector leaders from around the world in their modest home in Claremont, where they also raised four children and lived for nearly four decades. In 1987, the university named its management school after him.
Drucker called himself a “social ecologist,” a close observer of the way humans are organized across all sectors—in business, but also in government and in the nonprofit world.
“None of my books or ideas means anything to me in the long run,” he said. “What are theories? Nothing. The only thing that matters is how you touch people. Have I given anyone insight? That’s what I want to have done. Insight lasts; theories don’t. And even insight decays into small details, which is how it should be. A few details that have meaning in one’s life are important.”
Although many MBA programs ignored his texts because administrators felt his work was short on pure research, he had great impact on the business world through his books and consulting work with dozens of organizations—including the world’s largest corporations, entrepreneurial startups, and various government and nonprofit agencies. He was a Wall Street Journal columnist from 1975 to 1995, and contributed to such publications as the Harvard Business Review, The Atlantic Monthly and The Economist.
Ahead of His Time Drucker’s track record is impressive, as BusinessWeek succinctly summarized upon his death in 2005. Among his accomplishments:
--He introduced the idea of decentralization—in the 1940s—which became a bedrock principle for virtually every large organization in the world.
--He was the first to assert—in the 1950s—that workers should be treated as assets, not as liabilities to be eliminated.
--He originated the view of the corporation as a human community—again, in the 1950s—built on trust and respect for the worker and not just a profit-making machine, a perspective that won Drucker an almost godlike reverence among the Japanese.
Conclusions
Peter F. Drucker, author of many works including MANAGING FOR RESULTS and MANAGEMENT: TASKS, RESPONSIBILITIES, PRACTICES has now written a work on innovation and entrepreneurship. This book, whose primary focus is on the actions and behavior of entrepreneurs, presents innovation and entrepreneurship as a practice and a discipline. INNOVATION AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP is divided into three main sections: “The Practice of Innovation,” “The Practice of Entrepreneurship,” and “Entrepreneurial Strategies.” The introduction describes innovation and entrepreneurs in relation to the economy; the conclusion describes them in relation to society. In Part 1, Drucker defines innovation as a means by which entrepreneurs may exploit change in order to create new service and business opportunities. Entrepreneurial enterprises by their nature create a market niche and fill a consumer need. These enterprises include small businesses, large enterprises, and nonbusiness service institutions. Sources for innovative opportunities in enterprises include new knowledge (scientific and non-scientific) and changes in industry structure, demographics, and perceptions. Drucker’s principles of innovation require analysis of opportunities, receptivity to new opportunities, starting small, looking to the simple, and achievement of leadership. Part 2 focuses on managerial strategies for the new venture, the existing business, and the public service institution. All organizations must acquire entrepreneurial competence to keep pace with changes in economy and society. Leaders in the three types of organizations must become skilled in entrepreneurial management. Part 3 examines practices and policies that entrepreneurs should follow in the marketplace. Drucker’s strategies involve aiming for leadership and/or dominance of a new market or existing market, finding and occupying a specialized niche, and changing the economic characteristics of a product, market, or industry. In concluding, Drucker stresses the need for innovation and entrepreneurship in society. To obtain this, entrepreneurial executives must make innovation and entrepreneurship “a normal, ongoing, everyday activity, a practice in their own work and in that of their organization.” This treatise on innovation and entrepreneurship should be required reading for today’s business people.
Many of Peter F. Drucker´s publications The End of Economic Man: The Origins of Totalitarianism (1939) The Future of Industrial Man (1942) Concept of the Corporation (1945) The New Society (1950) The Practice of Management (1954) America's Next 20 Years (1957) Landmarks of Tomorrow: A Report on the New 'Post-Modern' World (1959) Power and Democracy in America (1961) Managing for Results: Economic Tasks and Risk-Taking Decisions (1964) The Effective Executive (1966) The Age of Discontinuity (1968) Technology, Management and Society (1970) Men, Ideas and Politics (1971) Management: Tasks, Responsibilities and Practices (1973) The Unseen Revolution: How the Pension Fund Came to America (1976) An Introductory View of Management (1977) Adventures of a Bystander (1979) Song of the Brush: Japanese Painting from the Sanso Collection (1979) Managing in Turbulent Times (1980) Toward the Next Economics and Other Essays (1981) The Changing World of the Executive (1982) The Temptation to Do Good (1984) Innovation and Entrepreneurship: Practice and Principles (1985) The Frontiers of Management (1986) The New Realities (1989) Managing the Non-Profit Organization: Practices and Principles (1990) Managing for the Future: The 1990s and Beyond (1992) The Post-Capitalist Society (1993) The Ecological Vision: Reflections on the American Condition (1993)
The Theory of the Business (1994) Managing in a Time of Great Change (1995) Drucker on Asia: A Dialogue Between Peter Drucker and Isao Nakauchi (1997) Peter Drucker on the Profession of Management (1998) Management Challenges for the 21st Century (1999) The Essential Drucker: The Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker's Essential Writings on Management (2001) Leading in a Time of Change: What it Will Take to Lead Tomorrow (2001; with Peter Senge) The Effective Executive Revised (2002) Managing in the Next Society (2002) A Functioning Society (2003) The Daily Drucker: 366 Days of Insight and Motivation for Getting the Right Things Done (2004) Managing Oneself (2005) The Effective Executive in Action (2006)
