Page 272 - The Drucker Lectures

ABOUT PETER F. DRUCKER

orn in Vienna, Austria, in 1909, Peter F. Drucker was a
Bwriter, professor, management consultant, and self-de-
scribed “social ecologist,” who explored the way human beings
organize themselves and interact much the way an ecologist
would observe and analyze the biological world.
Hailed by BusinessWeek as “the man who invented manage-
ment,” Drucker directly influenced a huge number of leaders
from a wide range of organizations across all sectors of society.
Among the many: the White House, General Electric, IBM,
Intel, Procter & Gamble, Girl Scouts of the USA, the Salvation
Army, Red Cross, and the United Farm Workers.
Drucker’s 39 books, along with his countless scholarly and
popular articles, predicted many of the major developments of
the late twentieth century, including privatization and decen-
tralization, the rise of Japan to economic world power, the de-
cisive importance of marketing and innovation, and the emer-
gence of the information society with its necessity of lifelong
learning. In the late 1950s, Drucker coined the term “knowledge
worker,” and he spent the rest of his life examining an age in
which an unprecedented number of people use their brains more
than their backs.
Throughout his work, Drucker called for a healthy balance—
between short-term needs and long-term sustainability; between
profitability and other obligations; between the specific mission
of individual organizations and the common good; between
freedom and responsibility.
Drucker’s first major work, The End of Economic Man, was
published in 1939. After reading it, Winston Churchill de-
scribed Drucker as “one of those writers to whom almost any-

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