Dear Charlie,
Thanks for your note on Peter Drucker. He _is a heroic figure.
I wish I had had an opportunity to sit in on one of his classes!
It occurs to me that some of the subscribers to Mg-Ed-Dv who
know one or two of Drucker's many books might want to read
more. Transaction Publishers is bringing most of his titles back
into print. Drucker's autobiography -- Adventures of a Bystander --
was published in 1998 by Wiley.
I post below advance copy of an article on Drucker from the
forthcoming Encyclopedia of New Media from Sage. The
encyclopedia will also contain useful articles on other management
scholars who have done work on media, information economics,
and related fields.
In a brief passing note, I'll draw the attention to Drucker's
1959 classic, _ Landmarks of Tomorrow: A Report on the new
"Post Modern" World _. As far as I can tell, this was the first
book to describe the symptoms of what would come to be
called post-modern society, though Drucker's sensible foundation
in empirical evidence leads him to different conclusions than many
of the continental philosophers who were to address the same
themes twenty years later.
Best regards,
Ken Friedman
Friedman, Ken. 2002. "Peter Drucker." In Encyclopedia of New Media.
Steve Jones, editor. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications,
Inc. [In press].
Copyright (c) 2002 Sage Publications
Peter F Drucker is the most influential management and business
writer of the twentieth century. His 1946 book, Concept of the
Corporation, was a classic in the original sense of the word. It
established a new class of book while creating the field of
management and redefining business administration as one aspect of a
larger frame.
Born in Austria in 1909, Drucker earned a doctorate in public law and
international relations at Frankfurt University while working full
time as financial writer and senior editor of Frankfurt's largest
daily newspaper. He moved to London to spend five years in merchant
banking while writing for European and American periodicals. In the
late 1930s, he moved to America to begin a long career as writer,
consultant, and teacher. Still active in his nineties, he has
published over 30 books with over six million copies sold. Most are
still in print.
Important books on business and administration appeared before
Drucker's work. Scholar Mary Parker Follett, engineer Frederick
Winslow Taylor, industrialist Henry Ford wrote influential books,
along with French mining executive Henry Fayol, and philosopher Adam
Smith. Drucker revolutionized the field with a series of powerful
distinctions resting on two central insights.
Ducker's first insight was that management is more than business or
administration. A social innovation of the twentieth century,
management is a specific kind of work, a practice enabling groups to
become effective, purposeful, and productive. Management has two
specific tasks. The first task is creating wholes that are larger
than a sum of parts, helping organizations produce more than the sum
of the resources fed into them. The second task is balancing the
immediate and long-term future of the organization in actions that
manage the organization, the managers who manage it, the workers, and
their work.
Drucker's second insight was that our society is a society of
organizations, public and private. Managers form a professional class
serving social needs.
Drucker developed these insights while studying General Motors for
The Concept of the Corporation. When he started the book, he was
launched on a promising academic career in economics and political
science. When he finished, he was warned that his view of the modern
organization would offend both economists and political scientists
both, and it did. In doing so, Drucker created the discipline of
management, "the organized, systematic study of the structure, the
policies, and the social and human concerns of the modern
organization."
Since 1946, Drucker has examined all the major aspects of social life
in the industrial world. Drucker's work links a broad knowledge of
history to a focused sense of time and circumstance.
Drucker's most astonishing skill is an ability to generate ideas and
insights by examining current developments in society. He describes
them clearly and frames them in a comprehensive theoretical
perspective. He examines the social effects and vital linkages of
current trends, bringing historical, political, and economic facts
together with an encyclopedic knowledge of current events and
technology. Drucker's ability to understand emerging developments
rests on a deep understanding of the ways that technology affects
society.
Drucker has consistently been among the first to identify and
articulate important trends. In the 1950s, he coined the term
"knowledge workers," in one of the first books to report on the idea
of a post-modern world. By the 1970s, he identified such central
trends of our time as globalization, post-industrial society, the
knowledge economy, the knowledge society, and many more. While many
see the phenomena that Drucker describes, he draws profound
conclusions by analyzing the consequences to which they lead.
Drucker's most creative insights involve ideas that are as dramatic
as they are current. One discovers with astonishment that many first
appeared in Drucker's writings thirty and forty years ago. His
ability to bring social theory together with technological
understanding reveals a scientific mind of the first order. One
example of Drucker's vision was a prediction in the 1950s of how -
and why - telecommunication would kill Life Magazine, and his
prediction of the ways in which emerging media would shape a
phenomenon much like today's Internet.
Despite Drucker's reputation as a business guru, his current focus is
the social sector organization. "The more economy, money, and
information become global," he writes, "the more community will
matter. And only the social sector nonprofit organization performs in
the community, exploits its opportunities, mobilizes its local
resources, solves its problems."
Drucker's great contribution has been to serve society by focusing
attention on the broad challenges of leadership. His current focus
places him at the forefront of community service in the global
village.
Related Topics
Bell, Daniel
Globalization
Information economy
Information society
Knowledge economy
Knowledge management
Knowledge society
Knowledge worker
Post-capitalist society
Post-industrial society
Post-modernism
Scenario planning
Schwartz, Peter
Works by Peter Drucker
Drucker, Peter F. Adventures of a Bystander. New York: John Wiley and
Sons, 1998.
Drucker, Peter F. The Age of Discontinuity. Guidelines to our
Changing Society. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1973.
Drucker, Peter F. The Concept of the Corporation. Rutgers, New
Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 1993.
Drucker, Peter F. The Ecological Vision. Rutgers, New Jersey:
Transaction Publishers, 1993.
Drucker, Peter F. The Effective Executive. New York: Harperbusiness, 1993.
Drucker, Peter F. The End of Economic Man. The Origins of
Totalitarianism. Rutgers, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 1993.
Drucker, Peter F. Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Practices and
Principles. New York: Harper and Row, 1985.
Drucker, Peter F. Landmarks of Tomorrow: A Report on the new "Post
Modern" World. With a new introduction by the author. Rutgers, New
Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 1996
Drucker, Peter F. Management Challenges for the 21st Century. New
York: Harperbusiness, 1999.
Drucker, Peter F. Management. Tasks Responsibilities Practices.
Harperbusiness, 1993.
Drucker, Peter F. Managing in a time of great change. New York:
Truman Talley Books, 1998.
Drucker, Peter F. The New Realities. London, Mandarin, 1990.
Drucker, Peter F. Post-capitalist society. Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann, 1993.
Drucker, Peter F. The Practice of Management. New York: Harperbusiness, 1993.
Bibliography
Beatty, Jack. The World According to Peter Drucker. New York: Bantam
Books, 1999.
Further Reading
Gabor, Andrea. The Capitalist Philosophers: The Geniuses of Modern
Business --Their Lives, Times, and Ideas. New York: Times Books, 2000.
Heller, Robert. Business Masterminds: Peter Drucker. London: DK
Publishing, 2000.
Knowledge@Wharton. [Drucker articles at online resource.]
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu (2001 June 1).
The Peter F Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management. [Includes
many links to Drucker articles and other online resources.]
http://www.pfdf.org/ (2001 May 29).
--
Ken Friedman, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Leadership and Strategic Design
Department of Technology and Knowledge Management
Norwegian School of Management
Visiting Professor
Advanced Research Institute
School of Art and Design
Staffordshire University