ABSTRACT
Peter Drucker is arguably the most popular and widely read management writer of all time. A guru who fully deserves his status, he regularly tops opinion polls among business men as the most influential management thinker and writer of the twentieth century. He has written more than twenty major books and innumerable articles, published over a span of more than sixty years. His interests and ideas range across the full spectrum of management, from ethics to technology, from economics to knowledge management. Probably more than any other individual, he has defined the nature of management and the tasks and purpose of the manager in modern business and society. Among the many honours he has received throughout his career is one unique among management gurus: a Korean businessman, whose admiration of Drucker’s works reached the point of total adulation, changed his own name to ‘Peter Drucker’ in honour of his hero. 1
Drucker was born in Vienna on 19 November 1909. His father, Adolph Drucker, was a lawyer and leading member of the liberal intelligentsia of pre-war Austria-Hungary, whose friends included the economist Joseph Schumpeter. Drucker was educated at the Vienna Gymnasium, and while in his teens flirted briefly with socialism. At seventeen he moved to Germany, working for a time in Hamburg before moving to Frankfurt where he attended university, graduating with a doctorate in international law in 1931. By this time he was also working as a financial journalist for a Frankfurt daily newspaper and was learning about economics and business. Implacably opposed to the
active and prolific writer. From the mid-1930s, and especially from the 1940s, the most important aspect of
Drucker’s career has been his writing, and the stages in his intellectual development can be charted through his books. Drucker has always been eclectic, and there are many crossovers of interest within his works; nonetheless, it is possible to categorise his books into three rough stages. These are:
1 The ‘economics’ books of the early period, including The End of Economic Man (1939), The Future of Industrial Man (1942) and Concept of the Corporation (1946).
