Peter Drucker
1909–2005
Founding management as a discipline; management by objectives; naming and analysing knowledge work.
- 1909LifeBorn
- 1933EventBorn in Vienna, he left Germany in 1933, settled in the United States, and wrote for seven decades.
- 1946EventConcept of the Corporation (1946) came from two years inside General Motors and was the first serious study of a large company's internal workings.
- 1954EventThe Practice of Management (1954) introduced management by objectives: managers agree measurable goals with their own superiors and are assessed…
- 1959EventDrucker named the knowledge worker in 1959 and spent the rest of his career on the consequences.
- 1967WorkThe Effective Executive
- 2005LifeDies
Peter Drucker (1909–2005) established management as a subject that could be studied rather than a knack some executives had. Born in Vienna, he left Germany in 1933, settled in the United States, and wrote for seven decades.
What he argued
His starting claim was that a business exists to create a customer. Profit is a condition of survival and a test of performance rather than the purpose, and an organization that cannot say who its customer is has no basis for deciding anything else.
Concept of the Corporation (1946) came from two years inside General Motors and was the first serious study of a large company's internal workings. The Practice of Management (1954) introduced management by objectives: managers agree measurable goals with their own superiors and are assessed against them, which distributes judgment rather than concentrating it.
The Effective Executive (1967) is his most practical book and the one most often read now. Effectiveness is a habit that can be learned, built on managing your own time, concentrating on the few things that matter, building on strengths rather than repairing weaknesses, and making decisions about generalities rather than symptoms. See The Effective Executive.
Knowledge work
Drucker named the knowledge worker in 1959 and spent the rest of his career on the consequences. A knowledge worker owns the means of production — what they know — and cannot be supervised the way manual work was, because the person doing the job usually understands it better than their manager. Productivity therefore depends on defining the task and then getting out of the way. The observation underlies most of what is now assumed about delegation and leverage.
Standing
He was consistently skeptical of fashion, wrote plainly, and treated management as a liberal art concerned with people rather than a branch of economics. Much of what later writers systematized was first stated by him.
Concept web
Open the full webQuestions
Who was Peter Drucker?
An Austrian-born writer (1909–2005) who established management as a formal discipline. He wrote more than thirty books over seven decades and introduced management by objectives and the concept of knowledge work.
What did Drucker mean by 'the purpose of a business is to create a customer'?
That a business is justified by the customer it creates rather than by the profit it makes. Profit is a condition of survival and a measure of performance, not the reason the organization exists.
What is a knowledge worker?
Drucker's term, coined in 1959, for someone whose main asset is what they know. Because they usually understand their work better than their manager, productivity depends on defining the task rather than supervising the method.