Management Expert Drucker Dies at 95
One of the fathers of business management theory died Friday at the age 95. Peter Drucker's numerous studies on leadership and management influenced how many corporations around the country treat their employees.
JENNIFER LUDDEN, host:
The legendary political economist, Peter Drucker, has died at age 95. Drucker wrote more than three dozen books and countless articles, but for such a prolific writer, he offered rather pithy advice.
(Soundbite from vintage interview)
Mr. PETER DRUCKER (Political Economist): The most important thing is to know what you're good at and very few people know that. All of us know what we're not good at.
LUDDEN: NPR's Jack Speer has this appreciation of the man known as the father of modern management.
JACK SPEER reporting:
Born in Vienna in 1909, Peter Drucker was a child of privilege. His parents counted among their friends such luminaries as Sigmund Freud. As a young man, Drucker earned a law degree. He went on to obtain his doctorate in international law at the University of Frankfurt, though he always maintained that was more to please his father than himself. Troubled by the rise of the Nazis, Drucker moved to London to work for a merchant bank. Jack Beatty, a Drucker biographer, told NPR's Todd Monk(ph) the Nazi period had a lasting influence.
Mr. JACK BEATTY (Drucker Biographer): He just got out of Europe before the Third Reich and he's conscious that he's had this extraordinary luck, and I think there's been a--that he's been spared really. And I think that this also has affected him. You know, he feels that he owes the world something.
SPEER: Drucker immigrated to America in 1937 and it was in his adopted country that he did his most influential work. In his very first book, "The End of Economic Man," Peter Drucker analyzed the causes of totalitarianism, the insecurity, fear, depression and unemployment, the demons as he put it, that created the conditions for the emergence of a dictator. Joseph Maciariello was a friend and colleague who now teaches at the Drucker School of Management in Claremont, California. He explains how Peter Drucker was able to reshape modern management theory.
Mr. JOSEPH MACIARIELLO (Drucker School of Management): He's been a critic but from the inside. He's been a friend of business, so he has spoken eloquently to executives about how to improve their performance while also being a critic. So, yeah, that's a tough act.
SPEER: Today, the idea that business management is a field worthy of serious academic study is uncontroversial, but before Peter Drucker, there really was no theory of management. His 18-month in-depth examination of General Motors led to the publication in 1946 of one of his most influential works, "Concept of the Corporation." The book was disavowed by GM management. Within a decade, Drucker published the work that would seal his reputation as a business guru, "The Practice of Management." Peter Senge, a senior lecturer at MIT who worked with Drucker, explains why the book holds up even today.
Mr. PETER SENGE (Lecturer, MIT): One of the reasons his books in general, as well as the classic one in 1954, have held up is he has a remarkable ability to kind of intellectualize from a very practical foundation. So I think he's had a big impact on managers, not just academics who have read his material because they get a feeling this is a person who kind of knows what my life is like, knows what it feels like to actually be in an organization.
SPEER: Drucker counseled managers and union leaders to give employees more control over their work environment. He held the purpose of business was to create customers and that businesses should be profitable. But he insisted employees were a resource and not a cost. Drucker disdained business fads, things like stock options for executives. In a 1990 interview with Bill Moyers on PBS, he summed up what defines a truly effective manager.
(Soundbite from vintage PBS interview)
Mr. DRUCKER: Leadership is performance and not personality. What you accomplish and what you enforce others to perform is just a great function of making incredible demands, not making it easy for people.
SPEER: And Peter Drucker did not exempt himself from those incredible demands, writing well into his 90s, often on a manual typewriter. In a 2004 article for the Harvard Business Review, Drucker had some advice for today's business leaders: Listen first and speak last. Peter Drucker, according to those who knew him, was perhaps the consummate listener.
Jack Speer, NPR News, Washington.
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