Peter Drucker has been described as the “father of modern management” and “the man who invented management,” but he himself liked to say that he simply “looked at people, not at machines or buildings.”
Born in Austria, Drucker received his Ph.D in international law in Germany in 1931, but he angered the Nazi government with his theories and fled to England, and later came to the U.S. In 1943, Drucker was invited to General Motors to study the company’s management structure. He spent two years there, and the result was a book that described a new “Concept of the Corporation” — perhaps the first “management book” ever; he wrote 41 books in all.
Drucker believed that macroeconomics failed to explain the modern economy (“In all recorded history there has not been one economist who has had to worry about where the next meal would come from,” he once said), that government did a poor job of providing people with what they wanted, and that there was a need for “community” (which could be satisfied by volunteering).
Drucker was later criticized by some of the very managers who praised him when he said that the highest executive in a corporation should earn no more than 20 times the lowest-paid worker. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2002, and received similar honors from the governments of Japan and Austria. He died November 11 at 95, eight days short of his 96th birthday.