Professor Dr. Peter F. Drucker's Life & Legacy

DRUCKER’S CAREER TIMELINE AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

Early Years

Peter Ferdinand Drucker was born in Vienna, Austria on November 19, 1909. The household in which he grew up was one of great intellectual ferment. His parents, Adolph and Caroline, regularly held evening salons with economists (including Joseph Schumpeter, who would come to have a tremendous influence on Drucker), politicians, musicians, writers and scientists. “That was actually my education,” Drucker later said.

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1920s

Drucker moved from Austria to Germany to study admiralty law at Hamburg University before transferring to Frankfurt University, where he studied law at night. He also became senior editor in charge of foreign affairs and business at Frankfurt’s largest daily newspaper, the Frankfurter General-Anzeiger.

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1930s

Drucker received his PhD in international law from Frankfurt University in 1932. Three years later, he moved to England after two of his essays—one on Friedrich Julius Stahl, a leading German philosopher, and a second, The Jewish Question in Germany—were banned and burned by the Nazis. In Cambridge, Drucker attended a lecture by leading economist John Maynard Keynes, and there had an epiphany: “I suddenly realized that Keynes and all the brilliant economic students in the room were interested in the behavior of commodities while I was interested in the behavior of people.” In 1934, Drucker married Doris Schmitz. They moved to the United States in 1937. Drucker served as a correspondent for several British newspapers, including the Financial Times. He eventually began teaching economics part time at Sarah Lawrence College in New York.

Title published in the 1930s
The End of Economic Man

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1940s

Drucker’s invitation to take a close peek inside General Motors resulted in the publication of his landmark book Concept of the Corporation in 1946. It was during this engagement that Drucker met legendary GM Chairman Alfred Sloan, who would in many ways become Drucker’s model for the effective executive. “The chief executive must be…absolutely tolerant and pay no attention to how a man does his work, let alone whether he likes a man or not,” Sloan told him. “The only criteria must be performance and character.” Drucker also became professor of philosophy and politics at Bennington College.

Titles published in the 1940s
The Future of Industrial Man
Concept of the Corporation

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1950s

In 1950, Drucker joined the faculty of New York University as professor of management; he would work there for 21 years. He also began his formal consulting practice and took on major assignments with Sears, Roebuck and IBM, among others. In 1954, he published The Practice of Management, widely considered the first book to organize the art and science of running an organization into an integrated body of knowledge. Before this, you could find books on individual aspects of managing a business—finance, for example, or human resources. But there was nothing that pieced it all together. What was out there “reminded me of a book on human anatomy that would discuss one joint in the body—the elbow, for instance—without even mentioning the arm, let alone the skeleton and musculature,” Drucker later recalled. By the time he began work on The Practice of Management, then, Drucker was, as he described it, “very conscious of the fact that I was laying the foundations of a discipline.” In 1959, Drucker coined the term “knowledge work,” foreshadowing a new economy in which brains would trump brawn.

Titles published in the 1950s
The New Society
The Practice of Management
America’s Next Twenty Years
The Landmarks of Tomorrow

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1960s

Drucker received the Presidential Citation at NYU, the school’s highest honor. He published the classic The Effective Executive in 1966. (Forty-two years later the Kalima project, which aims to increase the choice of books available to readers in Arabic, would choose The Effective Executive as one of the first 100 titles it translated, along with The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keynes, The Aeneid by Virgil and The Meaning of Relativity by Albert Einstein.) In 1968’s The Age of Discontinuity, Drucker wrote of a burgeoning phenomenon that, in hindsight, sounds an awful lot like Internet culture: “The impact of cheap, reliable, fast, and universally available information will easily be as great as was the impact of electricity. Certainly young people, a few years hence, will use information systems as their normal tools, much as they now use the typewriter or the telephone.”

Titles published in the 1960s
Managing for Results
The Effective Executive
The Age of Discontinuity

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1970s

In 1973, Drucker authored his magnum opus, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, which would become the playbook for generations of corporate executives, nonprofit managers and government leaders. Some have likened it to the Physicians’ Desk Reference for managers. In 1971, Drucker became the Marie Rankin Clarke Professor of Social Science and Management at what was then called Claremont Graduate School. He also began a 20-year tenure as a monthly columnist for The Wall Street Journal.

Titles published in the 1970s
Technology, Management and Society
The New Markets and Other Essays
Men, Ideas and Politics
Drucker on Management
Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices
The Unseen Revolution
People and Performance: The Best of Peter Drucker on Management
Adventures of a Bystander

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1980s

The Claremont Graduate Center of Management was renamed the Peter F. Drucker Management Center in 1987. Drucker published eight new titles during the decade in addition to maintaining active teaching and consulting activities. In 1989, he produced The Nonprofit Drucker, a five-volume audio series featuring insights into the management of the social sector.

Titles published in the 1980s
Managing in Turbulent Times
Toward the Next Economics and Other Essays
The Changing World of the Executive
The Last of All Possible Worlds (fiction)
The Temptation to Do Good (fiction)
Innovation and Entrepreneurship
Frontiers of Management
The New Realities

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1990s

The Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management (today called the Frances Hesselbein Leadership Institute) was established in 1990. Drucker delivered the prestigious Godkin Lecture at Harvard University in 1994. The Drucker Center became the Peter F. Drucker Graduate School of Management in 1997, and the Drucker Archives (a repository for Drucker’s manuscripts, letters and other material) was inaugurated in 1998. At the age of 87, Drucker was featured on the cover of Forbes under the headline: “Still the Youngest Mind.”

Titles published in the 1990s
Managing the Nonprofit Organization: Principles and Practices
Managing for the Future
The Ecological Vision
Post-Capitalist Society
Managing in a Time of Great Change
Drucker on Asia: A Dialogue between Peter Drucker and Isao Nakauchi
Peter Drucker on the Profession of Management
Management Challenges for the 21st Century

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2000s

Drucker taught his last course in the spring of 2002, at the age of 93 (though he’d continue to lecture periodically for the next several years). That summer, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. President Bush called Drucker “the world’s foremost pioneer of management theory.” In 2004, the Drucker Graduate School of Management became the Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management.

Asked near the end of his life what he considered his most important contributions, Drucker replied:

• That I early on—almost sixty years ago—realized that management has become the constitutive organ and function of the Society of Organizations;
• That management is not “Business Management”…but the governing organ of all institutions of Modern Society;
• That I established the study of management as a discipline in its own right; and
• That I focused this discipline on People and Power; on Values, Structure and Constitution; and above all on responsibilities—that is, focused the Discipline of Management on Management as a truly liberal art.

Drucker died on November 11, 2005, eight days shy of his ninety-sixth birthday. In 2006, the Drucker Archives became the Drucker Institute. Our mission is “strengthening organizations to strengthen society.”

Titles published in the the 2000s
The Essential Drucker
Managing in the Next Society
A Functioning Society
The Daily Drucker, with Joseph A. Maciariello
The Five Most Important Questions (posthumously released)

More about Peter F Drucker

• Peter Drucker’s Life and Legacy: Hailed by BusinessWeek as “the man who invented management,” Drucker directly influenced a huge number of leaders from a wide range of organizations across all sectors of society.
• A Drucker Sampler: Readings available online for free that cover three of Drucker’s core areas of focus—the individual, organizations and society
• Tributes to Drucker: Including Jim Collins on why “Peter Drucker contributed more to the triumph of freedom and free society over totalitarianism than anyone in the 20th century, including perhaps Winston Churchill”
• Books by Drucker: All 39 of his books as well as his monographs, other works and publications to which he was a contributing writer
• Books About Drucker: Personal and intellectual biographies, memoirs by Drucker’s former students and books on management that are rooted primarily and explicitly in Drucker’s work

Seven Significant Quotes by Peter F Drucker

1. “If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old.”
2. “What gets measured gets improved.”
3. “Results are gained by exploiting opportunities, not by solving problems.”
4. “So much of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to work.”
5. “People who don't take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year. People who do take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year.”
6. “Long-range planning does not deal with the future decisions, but with the future of present decisions.”
7. "Management is doing things right. Leadership is doing the right things"

(source: http://www.druckerinstitute.com/peter-druckers-life-and-legacy/druckers-career-timeline-and-bibliography/)

Books by Drucker

• 1939: The End of Economic Man (New York: The John Day Company)
• 1942: The Future of Industrial Man (New York: The John Day Company)
• 1946: Concept of the Corporation (New York: The John Day Company)
• 1950: The New Society (New York: Harper & Brothers)
• 1954: The Practice of Management (New York: Harper & Brothers)
• 1957: America's Next Twenty Years (New York: Harper & Brothers)
• 1959: Landmarks of Tomorrow (New York: Harper & Brothers)
• 1964: Managing for Results (New York: Harper & Row)
• 1967: The Effective Executive (New York: Harper & Row)
• 1969: The Age of Discontinuity (New York: Harper & Row)
• 1970: Technology, Management and Society (New York: Harper & Row)
• 1971: The New Markets and Other Essays (London: William Heinemann Ltd.)
• 1971: Men, Ideas and Politics (New York: Harper & Row)
• 1971: Drucker on Management (London: Management Publications Limited)
• 1973: Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices' (New York: Harper & Row)
• 1976: The Unseen Revolution: How Pension Fund Socialism Came to America (New York: Harper & Row)
• 1977: People and Performance: The Best of Peter Drucker on Management (New York: Harper's College Press)
• 1978: Adventures of a Bystander (New York: Harper & Row)
• 1980: Managing in Turbulent Times (New York: Harper & Row)
• 1981: Toward the Next Economics and Other Essays (New York: Harper & Row)
• 1982: The Changing World of Executive (New York: Harper & Row)
• 1982: The Last of All Possible Worlds (New York: Harper & Row)
• 1984: The Temptation to Do Good (London: William Heinemann Ltd.)
• 1985: Innovation and Entrepreneurship (New York: Harper & Row)
• 1986: The Frontiers of Management: Where Tomorrow's Decisions are Being Shaped Today (New York: Truman Talley Books/E.D. Dutton)
• 1989: The New Realities: in Government and Politics, in Economics and Business, in Society and World View (New York: Harper & Row)
• 1990: Managing the Nonprofit Organization: Practices and Principles (New York: Harper Collins)
• 1992: Managing for the Future (New York: Harper Collins)
• 1993: The Ecological Vision (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Transaction Publishers)
• 1993: Post-Capitalist Society (New York: HarperCollins)
• 1995: Managing in a Time of Great Change (New York: Truman Talley Books/Dutton)
• 1997: Drucker on Asia: A Dialogue between Peter Drucker and Isao Nakauchi (Tokyo: Diamond Inc.)
• 1998: Peter Drucker on the Profession of Management (Boston: Harvard Business School Publishing)
• 1999: Management Challenges for 21st Century (New York: Harper Business)
• 1999: Managing Oneself (Boston: Harvard Business School Publishing) [published 2008 from article in Harvard Business Review]
• 2001: The Essential Drucker (New York: Harper Business)
• 2002: Managing in the Next Society (New York: Truman Talley Books/St. Martin’s Press)
• 2002: A Functioning Society (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Transaction Publishers)
• 2004: The Daily Drucker (New York: Harper Business)
• 2008 (posthumous): The Five Most Important Questions (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass)

Other Drucker publications

Monographs

• 1932: The Justification of International Law and the Will of the State (Doctoral dissertation)
• 1933: Friedrich Julius Stahl, Conservative Political Theory & Historical Development (Tübingen: Mohr)
• 1936: The Jewish Question in Germany (Wien: Gsur)

Contributing writer

• 1961: Power and Democracy in America (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press Publishers)
• 1969: Preparing Tomorrow’s Business Leaders Today (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall)
• 1979: Song of the Brus: Japanese Painting from Sanso Collection (Seattle: Seattle Art Museum)
• 1988: Handbook of Management by Objectives with Bill Reddin and Denis Ryan (Published by Tata Mcgraw-Hill in New Delhi).
• 1991: The Rise of NEC (Blackwell Business)

Miscellaneous

• 1977: An Introductory View of Management (New York: Harper & Row)
• 1977 (revised edition, 2009): Management Cases (New York: Harper & Row)
• 2006: The Effective Executive In Action with Joseph A. Maciariello (New York: HarperCollins)
• 2006: Classic Drucker (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press)
• 2008 (posthumous): Management: Revised with sujog arya (New York: HarperCollins)