Peter Drucker

Biography

In May 1933 the Nazis put on the list of books to be publicly burned a work by the young lawyer Drucker on the conservative philosopher Friedrich Julius Stahl. The author was twenty-three, and he no longer lived in Germany: he had left Frankfurt within two days of the moment when the commissar sent to oversee the university dismissed its Jewish professors.

He was born on 19 November 1909 in Vienna, in the Döbling district. His father, Adolf Drucker, was a lawyer and senior civil servant, and his mother, Caroline Bondi, had studied medicine. The family was Lutheran. Intellectuals, government ministers and scholars gathered at the house; Schumpeter was a friend of his father’s, and Hans Kelsen was Peter’s uncle. After graduating from the Döbling Gymnasium in 1927, he found work hard to come by in post-war Vienna and went to Hamburg: first as an apprentice at a cotton trading firm, then as a journalist. He then moved to Frankfurt, worked on the newspaper Frankfurter General-Anzeiger, and in 1931 took a doctorate in international and public law at Goethe University. He was lecturing there when the Nazis came to power.

From Germany he went to England. In London he worked as a securities analyst at an insurance company, then as chief economist at a private bank. In 1934 he attended John Maynard Keynes’s lectures at Cambridge and later recalled realising that Keynes and the best students were interested in the behaviour of commodities, while he himself was interested in the behaviour of people.

In 1937 Drucker married Doris Schmitz, a fellow student from Frankfurt, and they moved to the United States. At first he wrote for magazines and newspapers as a freelance journalist. In 1939 his first book in English, “The End of Economic Man”, an analysis of the rise of fascism, was published in New York. At the same time he became a part-time instructor in economics at Sarah Lawrence College. In 1941 he was dismissed: he had refused to sign a faculty manifesto that he regarded as an unjust attack on Harry Gideonse, president of Brooklyn College. The book caught the attention of Lewis Webster Jones, president of Bennington College, and from 1942 to 1949 Drucker taught politics and philosophy there. During the war he also advised the Board of Economic Warfare on international economic policy. In 1943 he became an American citizen.

In 1942 his articles on politics and society gave him access to the inner workings of General Motors. Donaldson Brown, the designer of the company’s system of administrative control, invited him to carry out a two-year “political audit”: Drucker sat in on every board meeting, interviewed employees and studied how decisions were made. The book “Concept of the Corporation” brought him recognition and commissions, but inside the company it was received with hostility. Alfred Sloan, the chairman of the board, according to Drucker’s recollection, behaved as if the book did not exist and would not allow it to be mentioned in his presence.

From 1950 to 1971 Drucker taught management at New York University. In 1954 “The Practice of Management” appeared; he had set out to write it after finding no books in the General Electric library at Crotonville devoted specifically to running a business. It sets out management by objectives and self-control. Later he advised the heads of General Electric, Sears and IBM, as well as nonprofit organisations, among them the American Red Cross and the Salvation Army. He was read with particular attention in post-war Japan.

In 1971 he moved to California, to Claremont Graduate School (now a university), where he developed one of the first executive MBA programmes in the country for working professionals and held the chair in social science and management until the end of his life. In 1959 he coined the term “knowledge worker”. In all he wrote 39 books, including two novels and the autobiography “Adventures of a Bystander”; for ten years he wrote a column in the Wall Street Journal. The accuracy of his lectures was checked by the newspaper itself: in 1987 the Wall Street Journal found inaccuracies in them, to which he replied that he used anecdotes to make a point, not to write history. He disliked being called a “guru”.

The management school at Claremont took his name in 1987. On 9 July 2002 President George W. Bush presented him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom; there were also Austrian honours, among them the Grand Gold Decoration for Services to the Republic of Austria (1991). He taught his last class in 2002, at ninety-two, and went on advising organisations until almost ninety-five. Drucker died on 11 November 2005 in Claremont, California.