Page 20 - The Drucker Lectures

PART I

1940s

y the time the 1940s rolled around, many of the seminal events that
Bwould shape Peter Drucker’s core philosophy had already unfolded.
Most notably, the Nazis—who burned and banned some of Drucker’s ear-
liest writings—had swept across Europe, prompting the Austrian native
to leave for England in 1933 and then immigrate to the United States
in 1937. In between, while attending a Cambridge University lecture by
economist John Maynard Keynes, he had an epiphany: “I suddenly real-
ized that Keynes and all the brilliant economic students in the room were
interested in the behavior of commodities while I was interested in the
behavior of people.” In 1939, Drucker wrote The End of Economic Man,
exploring the rise of fascism on the continent he’d left behind. In 1942, he
published The Future of Industrial Man. At its heart was the notion that the
modern corporation had to justify its power and authority, while providing
the individual with dignity, meaning, and status—bedrock beliefs that
would infuse Drucker’s writing for the next six decades. By dissecting the
inner workings of a single enterprise, Drucker’s work took on a new cast
in 1946 with the release of Concept of the Corporation. The book examined
General Motors not just as a business but also as a social entity that
existed in the context of the broader community. Not everyone was im-
pressed with this deep analysis of organization and management—topics
that seemed to fall into a netherworld between politics and economics
and that heretofore were largely unexplored. One reviewer expressed the
hope that Drucker would “now devote his considerable talents to a more
respectable subject.” Thankfully, Drucker declined.

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