Peter Drucker passes on

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Paul Saffo <pls () well com>
Date: November 11, 2005 6:01:19 PM EST
To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
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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