Peter Drucker known as the ‘Father of Management’, born in Vienna, Austria on November 19, 1909 was born into a household which was of great intellectual ferment. His parents Adolph and Caroline were intellectuals who entertained intellectual gathering at their home with economist, politicians, musicians, writers, scientists etc. Peter referred to these gatherings as his venue for education. Due to less opportunity for employment in Vienna, he moved to Hamburg, Germany. He initially worked as a trainee at a cotton trading company and then served as a journalist, writing for Der Österreichische Volkswirt. Drucker, then, shifted to Frankfurt and took up a job at the Daily Frankfurter General-Anzeiger. Drucker married Doris Schmitz and shifted permanently to United States. In America, he took a job of a university professor, simultaneously working as a freelance writer and business consultant. In 1943, Drucker gained the citizenship of United States. Due to his effective initial writings on politics and society, he got access to the General Motors (GM) internal management in 1942.
Drucker was an amazing writer, a brilliant management consultant and a self-defined “social ecologist”. His works distinguish the organization of human across business, government and the non-profit sectors of society. He is among the best known and most influential thinkers on management theory and practices. Peter’s writings that which included major developments became true when in the late twentieth century, privatization and decentralization ruled the world. He had also predicted the rise of Japan to economic world power, the importance of marketing and the emergence of the information society with its necessity of lifelong learning. He is the one who had coined the term “knowledge worker” in 1959. In the late years of his life, Drucker believed that the ‘knowledge work productivity’ would be the next outline of management.
Drucker in his lifetime wrote 39 books that have been translated into more than thirty languages. Two amongst those are novels and one an autobiography. He was also the co-author of a book on Japanese painting, and made eight series of educational films on management topics. Apart from this, he also penned a regular column in the Wall Street Journal for 20 years and contributed every now and then to the Harvard Business Review, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Economist. Throughout his life, Drucker continued to act as a consultant to businesses and nonprofit organizations.
Peter Drucker was awarded New York University’s highest honor in 1969, the NYU Presidential Citation. He was inducted into the Junior Achievement U.S. Business Hall of Fame in 1996. Drucker was awarded the prestigious the Presidential Medal of Freedom award in July 2002 by President George W. Bush in acknowledgement of his work in the stream of management. He also received similar honor from governments of Japan and Austria. Drucker was appointed as the Honorary Chairman of the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management, the Leader to Leader Institute, from 1990 through 2002.To top it all, Drucker holds 25 honorary doctorates from American, Belgian, Czech, English, Spanish and Swiss Universities. Posthumously, the Eleventh Street between College Avenue and Dartmouth Avenue was renamed “Drucker Way” in October 2009 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Peter Drucker.
Peter died a natural death on November 11, 2005 at his home in Claremont, California at the age of 95 . Over the years, Drucker contributed immensely as a management consultant.
