Drucker was born in a suburb of Vienna in a small village named Kaasgraben in November 19, 1909. Drucker was the son of a high level civil servant in the Habsburg empire. 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. 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.
His career as a business thinker took off in 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.
Drucker's Philosophy and Teachings
As business schools and management gurus were pushing technical excellence, technology innovation, and ''command and control,'' Drucker focused on the human qualities of leadership and the need for clear and compelling goals. Both elements are evident in this excerpt from his essay on ''Management as Social Function and Liberal Art,'' which defines both for-profit and nonprofit management as essentially human endeavors.
- Management is about human beings. Its task is to make people capable of joint performance, to make their strengths effective and their weaknesses irrelevant. This is what organization is all about, and it is the reason that management is the critical, determining factor....
- Because management deals with the integration of people in a common venture, it
is deeply embedded in culture. What managers do in West Germany, in the United
Kingdom, in the United States, in Japan, or in Brazil is exactly the same. How
they do it may be quite different....
- Every enterprise requires commitment to common goals and shared values. Without such commitment there is not enterprise; there is only a mob. The enterprise must have simple, clear, and unifying objectives. The mission of the organization has to be clear enough and big enough to provide common vision. The goals that embody it have to be clear, public, and constantly reaffirmed. Management's first job is to think through, set, and exemplify those objectives, values, and goals.
- Management must also enable the enterprise and each of its members to grow and develop as needs and opportunities change. Every enterprise is a learning and teaching institution. Training and development must be built into it on all levels -- training and development that never stop.
Every enterprise is composed of people with different skills and knowledge doing many different kinds of work. It must be built on communication and on individual responsibility....
- Neither the quantity of output nor the ''bottom line'' is by itself an adequate measure of the performance of management and enterprise. Market standing, innovation, productivity, development of people, quality, financial results -- all are crucial to an organization's performance and to its survival. ...
Finally, the single most important thing to remember about any enterprise is that results exist only on the outside. The result of a business is a satisfied customer. The result of a hospital is a healed patient. The result of a school is a student who has learned something and puts it to work ten years later. Inside an enterprise, there are only costs.
The L.A. Times article announcing his death also references his fondness for the orchestra as a modern management metaphor:
''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.''
Amen.
1 comment:
Thanks for writing this.
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