The "father of management" and one of my favorite authors, Peter Drucker, died Friday just before turning 96. He was appropriately described as "the 20th century's most influential philosopher" in this excellently written obituary in the Financial Express; go read all of it.
Drucker was the source for many entries in my favorite quotes file—and I wasn't even finished transcribing all the underlining I've done in his books over the years. If you've never read anything of his, I strongly suggest fixing that problem. A good start is a recent book, The Daily Drucker, consisting of 366 different snippets from his past writings. Go to Amazon, or your favorite bookstore, and get it.
Here are a few Drucker gems from my file...
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I am not an economist—something I have known since, in 1934 as a young economist in a London merchant bank, I sat in the John Maynard Keynes seminar in Cambridge, I suddenly realized that Keynes was interested in the behavior of commodities, while I was interested in the behavior of people.
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I am not only willing but insist that in all political and social decisions the economic costs are calculated and taken into account. To talk only of "benefits" I consider irresponsible and bound to lead to disaster. And I believe in free markets, having seen far too much of the alternative.
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Management will remain a basic and dominant institution perhaps as long as Western civilization itself survives. . . Management is the organ of society specifically charged with making resources productive, that is, with the responsibility for organized economic advance.
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Joseph Schumpeter insisted that innovation is the very essence of economics and most certainly of a modern economy. . . In the economy of change and innovation, a profit, in contrast to Karl Marx's theory, is not a "surplus value" stolen from the workers. On the contrary, it is the only source of jobs for workers and of labor income. The theory of economic development shows that no one except the innovator makes a genuine "profit"; and the innovator's profit is always quite short-lived.
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For me the tension between the need for continuity and the need for innovation and change was central to society and civilization.
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I am one of many who will miss him.
