Peter Drucker

Peter Ferdinand Drucker (1909 - 2005) is probably best known as the father of "management". He focuses on all types of organizations: business, non-profit, and government.

He passed away on November 11, 2005, just 6 days shy of his 96th birthday. Peter was active until he died, and his final book "The Effective Executive In Action" is due in early 2006.

Drucker is the author of nearly 30 books, he has been writing books on socio-economics, politics, and management since 1939. He is the first author to identify management as a subject worthy of independent study, in particular with his books: the ConceptOfTheCorporation? (1946) ISBN 1560006250 , and the PracticeOfManagement? (1954) ISBN 0887306136 .

His 2001 book, The Essential Drucker (ISBN 006093574X ) is a comprehensive overview of his 60 years of writing in management. It's a wonderful introduction.

The 2003 book, A Functioning Society (ISBN 0765801590 ) is a comprehensive overview of his 65 years of writing on economics, society and politics, and is great if you're looking for some practical and lucid political / social philosophy.

His 1999 book, ManagementChallengesForTheTwentyFirstCentury, is a call to understand the vast social & economic transformation the world is undergoing, calling for employers to treat knowledge workers almost "like volunteers" or risk losing them.

His autobiography is fascinating (he grew up in Vienna, and lived in Germany in the early 1930s):

There have been three "unauthorized" biographies: Early books: A study of the origins of totalitarianism and facism: the idea is that mankind's self-conception as an "economic actor", rooted in 19th century, was a failure. Society turned to fascism in this identity crisis.

The above three represent the core trilogy of Drucker's social theory: society has transcended both capitalism and marxism and has become an "industrial" society (one that would evolve later into the "knowledge" society), with a strong need (still somewhat unmet) for a new definition of the function and status of its citizens.

The above represent the core books in Drucker's writings on management, with many auxillary books containing mainly essays.

The above are Drucker's core modern writings on society, economics and government. They are packed with insights: the rise of the knowledge society, the ineffectiveness of government, the idea of "privitization", the drag of military armaments, the fall of the USSR, etc.

Quite recently:

CategoryAuthor

EditText of this page (last edited November 27, 2005) or FindPage with title or text search