Peter Drucker

Their life

The inventor of management as a discipline. Across sixty years and thirty-nine books he taught that management is about human beings, knowledge workers must manage themselves, and every organization exists for the customer outside it.

Known for

• Concept of the Corporation (1946)
• Coining the term 'knowledge worker'
• Management by Objectives
• The Practice of Management (1954)
• Advocating decentralized organizations
• Founding management as an academic discipline

The road they walked

Peter Ferdinand Drucker was born in 1909 in Vienna, into a household where his father's civil-service dinners drew economists, doctors, and once, by family account, Sigmund Freud. It was a city of coffeehouses and collapsing empires, and Drucker grew up fluent in the anxious, argumentative intellectual culture of late Habsburg Austria. He took a doctorate in international law in Frankfurt in 1931 while working as a journalist and banking economist, and in 1933, shortly after Hitler took power, he wrote a pamphlet defending a conservative Jewish political philosopher, Friedrich Julius Stahl — a piece the Nazis banned and burned. Drucker left Germany that year, worked in London, and emigrated to the United States in 1937, arriving with a law degree, a half-formed vocation, and no clear name yet for the thing he was about to invent.

The turning point came in 1943, when General Motors invited him inside the company for an eighteen-month study of how a modern corporation actually governed itself. The result, Concept of the Corporation (1946), was the first serious attempt to treat management as a subject of its own — not economics, not engineering, but a discipline with its own logic, worth studying the way one studies law or medicine. GM's own executives were reportedly cool toward some of its conclusions, but the book found an eager audience elsewhere, and Drucker had found his field, at a moment when American industry was scaling up fast and had no real theory of how to run itself beyond command and output.

Over the next six decades, from posts at NYU and later Claremont Graduate School, Drucker built out that field book by book — The Practice of Management (1954), which introduced management by objectives; The Effective Executive (1966); Innovation and Entrepreneurship (1985) — while consulting for corporations like GE and IBM and, just as insistently, for hospitals, churches, and the Girl Scouts, on the conviction that nonprofits needed rigorous management too. He coined 'knowledge worker' in 1959 and spent the rest of his life arguing that such workers had to be managed differently, and largely by themselves. By the time he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2002, he was simply 'the man who invented management,' a title he'd earned by treating a practical problem as a serious idea.

How their story ended

Drucker died on November 11, 2005, at his home in Claremont, California, eight days before what would have been his ninety-sixth birthday. He had continued writing, consulting, and teaching almost to the end, publishing his last major work only a few years earlier. His death was attributed to natural causes, a quiet close to a life that had spent sixty years insisting organizations were, in the end, made of people.

In their words

We attribute every quotation to the person we believe said it, and cite the source where we can place it. If you spot a misattribution or a factual error, please tell us — we will check it and correct the record.

Tables where Peter sits

The Boardroom

For building and running a business that lasts.

From the Journal