Peter Drucker

Peter Ferdinand Drucker was an Austrian American management consultant, educator, and author who helped shape the philosophical and practical foundations of modern management theory. Born in Vienna on November 19, 1909, he came of age in the unsettled years after World War I and built his career across Europe and the United States. His subject was not only business, but the way human beings organize themselves in companies, governments, and nonprofit institutions. He died on November 11, 2005, after a long working life that extended well into his nineties.

Drucker grew up in what he called a “liberal” Lutheran Protestant household in Austria-Hungary. His mother, Caroline Bondi, had studied medicine, and his father, Adolf Drucker, was a lawyer and high-level civil servant. Their Vienna home was a place where intellectuals, officials, and scientists discussed new ideas. Among those around him were Joseph Schumpeter, Friedrich Hayek, and Ludwig von Mises; Hans Kelsen was his uncle. After graduating from Döbling Gymnasium in 1927, Drucker left a Vienna with few opportunities and moved first to Hamburg, then to Frankfurt, working in trade and journalism while earning a doctorate in international law and public law from Goethe University Frankfurt in 1931.

The Nazi takeover in 1933 changed the course of his life. Drucker was then a lecturer in Frankfurt, and after the Nazi commissar overseeing the university dismissed all Jewish professors, he left Germany within 48 hours for England. In London he worked as a security analyst and then as chief economist at a private bank. He also attended John Maynard Keynes’s seminars at Cambridge, where he later said he realized that Keynes and the students were interested in “the behavior of commodities,” while he was interested in “the behavior of people.” That distinction ran through much of his later work.

In 1937, Drucker married Doris Schmitz, a classmate from the University of Frankfurt, and the couple moved to the United States. He wrote as a freelance journalist for Harper’s and The Washington Post, taught part time at Sarah Lawrence College, and later became a professor of politics and philosophy at Bennington College from 1942 to 1949. During World War II, he also consulted on international economic policy for the Board of Economic Warfare, and in 1943 he became a naturalized U.S. citizen. His first book, The End of Economic Man, appeared in 1939 as a contemporary analysis of the rise of fascism.

Drucker is best known for making management a serious field of study and practice. From 1950 to 1971, he was a professor of management at New York University. In 1954 he published The Practice of Management, a book he set out to write after finding few books specifically about business management in the General Electric library at Crotonville, New York. He helped popularize management by objectives and self-control, and in 1959 coined the term “knowledge worker.” Later, he regarded knowledge-worker productivity as the next frontier of management. His writings also anticipated developments such as privatization, decentralization, Japan’s rise as an economic world power, the importance of marketing, and the emergence of the information society with its need for lifelong learning.

In 1971, Drucker moved to California, where he helped develop one of the country’s first executive MBA programs for working professionals at Claremont Graduate University. From then until his death, he was the Clarke Professor of Social Science and Management at Claremont, teaching his last class in 2002 at age 92 and continuing to consult for businesses and nonprofit organizations well into his nineties. His work stayed close to people: how organizations can bring out their best, and how workers can find community and dignity in large institutions. That is why a line such as “The best way to predict the future is to create it” still feels at home beside his name. It sounds practical, active, and human.