The Father of Management Theory

Peter Drucker: The Father of Management Theory

Drucker, the man who invented management theory, put great currency in listening, asking questions and letting natural patterns emerge from the answers.
The author of 39 books during his long career, and counselor to titans of business and rulers of nations, Drucker championed the powers of observation, often formulating simple ideas that triggered startling results. The Practice of Management (1954) and The Effective Executive (1966) are considered his landmark works. Part of Drucker’s genius lay in his ability to find patterns among seemingly unconnected disciplines. “The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said,” he once said.
“Whether it’s recognized or not, the organization and practice of management today is derived largely from the thinking of Peter Drucker,” BusinessWeek reported shortly after his death at 95 in 2005. “What John Maynard Keynes is to economics or W. Edwards Deming to quality, Drucker is to management.”

High-Octane Testimonials
Many of Drucker’s notions might be considered common sense today, but they broke considerable new ground when he first started studying and writing about them in the 1940s. His work, and personal contact, shaped the thinking of the top management minds in the world.
“He was the creator and inventor of modern management,” management expert Tom Peters told Newsweek in 2005. “In the early 1950s, nobody had a tool kit to manage these incredibly complex organizations that had gone out of control. Drucker was the first person to give us a handbook for that.”
Drucker, born in Austria in 1909, gained his first experience in this listening-and-learning approach from his parents, Adolph and Caroline, highly educated professionals who reveled in inviting cadres of intellectually stimulating characters into their Vienna home for broad discourses on medicine, politics and music.read more...