Page 36 - The Drucker Lectures

PART II

1950s

usiness historian Alfred D. Chandler Jr. has described the 1950s as a
B“Golden Age of Capitalism” in which big American companies fueled
economic growth by exploiting “new knowledge-intensive as well as cap-
ital-intensive technologies in chemistry, pharmaceuticals, aircraft, and
electronics.” One can easily add to that list another innovation of the era:
management. And more than anyone, it was Peter Drucker who showed
the way. His 1954 book, The Practice of Management, became the guide
to which countless executives turned in order to master the basics: “What
is our business and what should it be?” “Management by objectives
and self-control.” “The spirit of an organization.” “Motivating to peak
performance.” Years later, management scholar Jim Collins would note
that when he dug into the backgrounds of “visionary companies” such as
General Electric, Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble, Hewlett-Packard,
Merck, and Motorola, he discovered Drucker’s “intellectual fingerprints”
everywhere. “David Packard’s notes and speeches from the foundation
years at HP so mirrored Drucker’s writings,” Collins said, “that I conjured
an image of Packard giving management sermons with a classic Drucker
text in hand.” Drucker himself said that, after 10 years of consulting and
teaching, he was simply filling a void with The Practice of Management.
Nothing like it existed. “So I kind of sat down and wrote it, very conscious
of the fact that I was laying the foundations of a discipline.” By the end
of the decade, Drucker had also coined a new term: “knowledge worker.”
And he would spend the rest of his days contemplating the ways in which
knowledge had supplanted land, labor, and capital as “the one critical
factor of production.”

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