Peter drucker who is

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Checkout items. Choose Exam Dates and Additional Materials. Add to cart. Drucker gave his last lecture at CGU in spring , not long before his death, at the age of This is a serious, degenerative, compulsive disorder and addiction. Above all, he wrote about the need for all of our institutions to flourish in order to have a functioning society. Drucker wrote 39 books in all. They were mostly about management, economy, polity and society, but there were two novels among them.

As the story goes, the concept was so counterintuitive that many readers thought the magazine had made a huge typo; surely, it had gotten things backwards. Anyone who was familiar with Drucker, however, knew that he believed in the power of the best nonprofits not only to be effective and highly impactful for the recipients of their services, but also to provide a much-needed sense of fulfillment for their volunteers.

In , he created the Peter F. That was surely overstating things. But there is no doubt that they admired him. Drucker as Consultant. In many cases, they were deceptively simple: Who is your customer?

Drucker as Teacher. Drucker as Writer. What justifies its existence? What things will it do and not do? What important benefits, beyond profits or shareholder value, does it strive to produce? How does it contribute to something the world truly needs? How does every little thing made by the company help it build a positive and constructive legacy?

As they endeavor to answer these questions, executives naturally begin to think about their roles as citizens and human beings. This often helps them not only to become more deeply conscious of the purpose of their work and that of their companies, but also to reinvent the very meaning of their leadership journey. Now more than ever, technology demands of business hardheaded adaptation to objective circumstances and increasingly vigilant commitment to ultimate social purposes.

Business must clearly understand and meet both obligations to be successful—even to survive—under these modern conditions. In Japan, Drucker finds, the decision-making process is different from its American counterpart in three essential ways: 1 Decisions, as such, tend to be big ones—that is, they have to do with matters of far-reaching importance; 2 in making them, an inordinate amount of time is allowed for the painstaking achievement of consensus among all those concerned; and 3 once made, they rapidly translate into a course of action—one often radically at odds with previous policy.

From his long acquaintance with the Japanese way of doing things, Drucker knows that this otherwise inexplicable sequence of foot-dragging and full speed makes perfect, if unfamiliar, sense. Unlike American managers, whose decisions typically focus on the merits of a single option and whose concerns are more tactical than strategic, the Japanese take great care first to define the precise nature of the issue at hand. Only then do they methodically review every available course of action.

By contrast, American managers do not as a rule discipline themselves to consider all possible alternatives. More important, they do not regularly force themselves to think through the kind of issue it is that confronts them. Though the compromises made are roughly comparable to those implicit in any Japanese consensus, they are structurally deficient in a way the Japanese ones are not. Coming after the fact, American compromises and the inevitable trade-offs they involve can play havoc with the systematic logic of the original decision; coming before the fact, Japanese compromises are by definition included—and accounted for—within the decision itself.

Ideas for Drucker have both an external historical or cultural context and an internal logic of argument.

The first gives them their shaping assumptions and conceptual vocabulary; the second, their systematic cogency. The first roots them in time and place; the second makes them more generally applicable. The first underscores their relativity; the second stresses their universality. Drucker does not deny the tension between context and logic. Rather, by looking closely at both, he is repeatedly able to define the relevant terms of discussion, reduce them to first principles, uncover improper assumptions or inferences, and identify hidden contradictions.

More specifically, he treats wages and wage policy in such a way as to unmask the quite different starting assumptions of employer and employee. He attacks the arbitrariness of the yearly accounting period, pointing up the great distance between an abstract convention and the reality it is to represent. He shows the typical criteria for promotion within management to be structurally contradictory—that is, in conflict with binding economic objectives.

This breadth of critical vision is, in turn, an apt expression of an instinctively holistic process of thought. As a number of Drucker-watchers have argued, his mind gravitates neither to the isolated fact nor to the mechanically causal explanation. Instead, Drucker responds most richly to the kaleidoscopic patterns and configurations among facts and to the process-based explanation of their significance.

Separate, random data become facts, and isolated facts take on importance only by virtue of their participation in—and relation to—wholes larger than themselves. For example, his insistence on marketing as the essential, ubiquitous task of management attests to a view of business as a process necessarily oriented toward the creation and satisfaction of customers.

Similarly, he extrapolates a few ideal patterns from the mass of individual variations of production and organization principles. In fact, when Drucker writes of the profession of management, he invariably conceives of it as a discipline that teaches its practitioners to identify the constellations of significance in the otherwise chaotic flow of information and circumstance. It does far more than simply impart useful information.

It provides a case study in how to think. Though often pointed and prescriptive, it rarely loses its tone of calm rationality or strays from its primary commitment to objective analysis.

Quite the opposite: It is remorselessly fair-minded. I knew Peter Drucker for 30 years. Aside from the personal career advice he gave me, his view of the responsibility of business to society and of management consultants to clients has had a profound impact on my life.

In the Next Society, the biggest challenge…may be its social legitimacy: its values, its mission, its vision. Too many business leaders pay lip service to social responsibility. They see it as more about image which can be delegated to the PR department than about substance which is core to strategy. Their predominant concern remains maximizing short-term shareholder value—a narrow focus that Drucker decried.

They focus almost entirely on the economic side of management. All too often cost-cutting and layoffs are their prescriptions. A root cause of the problem is education. Drucker considered management one of the liberal arts and therefore believed that managers should be educated in the humanities and the social sciences.

I wholeheartedly agree. Management innovators have produced an abundance of concepts and tools to help corporations improve their economic performance. Where are the concepts and tools to help them improve their social performance? As disseminators of knowledge in the business world, management consultants can and should help organizations become better corporate citizens and regain public trust. The best way to help a client improve its performance is to build on its strengths, including the best aspects of its culture.

Drucker also believed that a consultant should respect all his clients and remember that he lives off their knowledge. This makes eminent sense: If consultants are to disseminate best practices, they must be not only good teachers but also good students. The corporation is entering a new era—one in which it will have to reinvent itself not just to compete but also to prove its social legitimacy.

As change agents, management consultants will have a critical role to play. To some, this unflappable deliberateness proves maddening beyond words. Impatience of mind turns over the authority in argument to the itch of irritation and removes it from the sway of reason. When reading Drucker, one responds not only to the fair-mindedness but also to the obvious grace and cultivation of language.

But if the substance of his books is neither original nor unique, if what they offer at best is no more or less than the readily paraphrasable content of his thinking, why bother to read them? Why, in short, read Peter Drucker and not a streamlined digest of his major ideas? One can learn more—and more deeply—from watching him think than from studying the content of his thought.

He discusses economic life in terms of values, integrity, character, knowledge, vision, responsibility, self-control, social integration, teamwork, community competence, social responsibility, the quality of life, self-fulfilment, leadership This lesson still rings true today.

Search this Guide Search. Peter Drucker: A Resource Guide This guide provides background and further reading on the influential managment thinker Peter Drucker, often described as "the inventor of modern management.