[IP] Peter Drucker passes on
Begin forwarded message:
From: Paul Saffo <pls@xxxxxxxx>
Date: November 11, 2005 6:01:19 PM EST
To: Dave Farber <dave@xxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Peter Drucker passes on
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-111105drucker_lat,
0,2724903.story?coll=la-home-headlines
Peter F. Drucker, Management Guru, Dies at 95
By James Flanigan and Thomas S. Mulligan
Special to The Times
2:15 PM PST, November 11, 2005
Peter F. Drucker, considered by many the "father of modern
management" for his innovative approaches to leadership in the
workplace, died today. He was 95.
His death was announced by Claremont Graduate University, where
Drucker was the Marie Rankin Clarke professor of social sciences and
management from 1971 to 2003, and where he continued to write and
consult up to the time of his death.
Drucker was called "the man who invented management," but on the
occasion of his 90th birthday, he described his life work much more
simply: "I looked at people, not at machines or buildings."
That approach led to almost three dozen books and thousands of
articles that form nothing less than a guide to the 20th century
economy.
Drucker did not think up economic theories or elaborate systems of
business operation. Rather, he looked at people working, put them in
historical context, and saw "a new liberal art": management.
General Motors, which invited Drucker to study its corporate
structure in 1943, provided his laboratory and his epiphany. He was
then a professor at Bennington College in Vermont and the author of
two books on society and industry.
At GM during wartime, Drucker found "the corporation as human effort
people of diverse skills and knowledges working together in a large
organization," he wrote in "Concept of the Corporation," the 1946
book that emerged from his two years studying GM.
It was something new in world history, different from the "command
and control" methods of organizing labor that had characterized the
building of the pyramids or Napoleon's army or even Henry Ford's
assembly line.
"The overseer of the unskilled peasants who dragged stone for the
pyramids did not concern himself with morale or motivation," Drucker
wrote.
But modern management is different, he said. "Its task is to make
people capable of joint performance, to make their strengths
effective and their weaknesses irrelevant," he said in various ways
in his 18 books on the profession of management.
Drucker saw management as a central necessity of the society of
organizations in which people lived in the 20th century. It was a
discipline that was not confined to commercial business, but one that
enabled hospitals, universities, churches, labor unions and the Girl
Scouts to function.
In a metaphor that he used repeatedly, Drucker likened the society of
organizations to an orchestra. "Each institution has to do its own
work the way each instrument in an orchestra plays only its own part.
But there is also the score, the community. And only if each
individual instrument contributes to the score, there is music."
Peter Ferdinand Drucker was born Nov. 19, 1909, the son of a civil
servant in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father, Adolph, was head
of the export department in Austria's government, an important post.
Coming from a society of strict class distinctions, Drucker was ever
mindful of the social ladders in various countries. In the home of a
senior civil servant such as his father, Drucker would remark with
irony later in life, "We never had businessmen to the house."
Drucker studied at universities in Hamburg and Frankfurt, Germany,
receiving a PhD in international law in 1931. But he never used the
title "doctor," preferring often to characterize himself as a
newspaperman, which he was in the early 1930s in Frankfurt.
But in 1933 an essay on a leading conservative philosopher angered
the Nazi government, which banned Drucker's writing. He moved to
London, where he worked for a merchant bank.
In 1937, Drucker married Doris Schmitz, whom he had known in
Frankfurt, and the couple moved to the United States, where he wrote
for British newspapers, taught part time at Sarah Lawrence College
and published his first book, "The End of Economic Man: The Origins
of Totalitarianism." It would be one of 14 books he wrote on social,
economic and political questions in addition to his books on management.
Drucker in the 1940s advocated the principle of worker
responsibility, which caught on in postwar Japan before U.S. business
belatedly took it up.
Drucker never made predictions, but for almost two decades he has
called attention to the rise of what he termed "knowledge work" and
"knowledge workers."
He taught business management at New York University until 1971, when
he came West to Claremont Graduate School, which was later named the
Drucker Graduate University in his honor.
Drucker was 61 when he came to Claremont. And he wrote the majority
of his 32 books in the nearly three decades that followed.
He had an acute sense and knowledge of history. In "Management
Challenges for the 21st Century," a book he published in 1999,
Drucker noted that the high tech entrepreneurs so lionized today
appeared before in history, after the invention of the printing press
in 1450.
For 50 to 100 years, printers were showered with honors and riches,
as developers of computers and software are today. But then printing
came to be taken for granted, and the printers' place of honor was
taken by publishers, the controllers of "content".
A patient and humorous man — father of three daughters and a son,
grandfather of six — Drucker had a keen eye for the ways individuals
develop in society. To a magazine writer who sought guidance for an
article on the role of business schools, Drucker advised: "Don't go
to Harvard, but to the business school at the University of Scranton.
That's where they are changing lives."
Drucker was precise in teaching business managers what they were to
do, from determining "the purpose of the business," as he put it, to
identifying the customer of the company.
"Profit," he taught generations of business leaders, "is not a reward
of doing business but a cost," because it must be paid out to those
who financed the business or plowed back in to allow the business to
continue.
A protean scholar, Drucker was also an expert on Japanese art, which
he noted had perfected abstraction and geometric form fully a century
before Monet and Picasso thought of them. It was the kind of insight
and irony the man who "looked at people" cherished.
Drucker is survived by his wife, Doris, and their four children and
six grandchildren.
Flanigan is a former Times columnist and Mulligan is a Times staff
writer.
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