RIP Peter Drucker

[rgraham666]

I found out this morning we lost another great one. I always regarded him a one of the world's premier heretics.

Management guru had inauspicious start
Nov.*14, 2005. 06:39*AM
DAVID OLIVE

On the strength of a 1929 article arguing that stock prices could only continue to rise, a 19-year-old writer named Peter Drucker landed his first job.

The article, which brought Drucker heaps of praise from many quarters, appeared in a prestigious German journal on Oct. 15 of that fateful year, and "We all know what happened a few days later," the father of management consulting later said. "That was my last prediction."

Not by a long shot was that Drucker's last prediction — even if he regretted his reputation as a futurist — but it was arguably the last time Drucker was wrong about something important.

Drucker, who died last Friday at 95, introduced the term "knowledge worker" to the language 46 years ago, and "managing by objectives" not long after. Regarded as common sense today, the notion that employees would come to be valued for their intellectual acumen — and gain from that status a large measure of independence from employers, if they did not abandon corporate life altogether as self-employed entrepreneurs — was regarded as fantastical in the Eisenhower era of mass conformity and of loyalty to a model of the paternalistic corporation that is now becoming obsolete.

So it also was with Drucker's urging in the 1940s and 1950s that managers collaborate with front-line employees in setting goals, or objectives, and then liberate those employees to devise the best means of achieving them. Widely applied in the corporate world since the mid-1980s, that was a winning prescription both for decentralizing power — delegating it to the people who do the actual work — and for holding top managers accountable in setting and meeting ambitious goals at a time when complacent giants like General Motors Corp. and AT&T Corp. were oblivious to the first signs of bureaucratic sclerosis that would someday imperil them.

A man of unrivalled prescience, Drucker warned that the 1970s would be cursed by double-digit inflation; that the power of unions would ebb; and that the power of pension funds and other institutional investors would grow.

At a time when "Made in Japan" was a label for products perceived to be of poor quality, Drucker foresaw a time when efficient, innovative Japanese manufacturers would push American competitors to the wall.

And in his 60s, Drucker began tutoring non-profit groups — whose activities he regarded as vital in addressing social needs increasingly neglected by government and business — that they, too, must produce tangible results to match their sometimes fuzzy mission statements or risk a drought of donors. That is the demand now made of non-profit organizations by Bill Gates and the current generation of results-oriented philanthropists.

Author of more than 30 books and thousands of magazine and newspaper essays, and a consultant to blue-chip corporations, universities, governments in the U.S., Canada and other nations, and non-profits as varied as the Archdiocese of New York and the Girl Guides of America, Drucker had a ubiquity to compare, in the best sense, to that of the wise counsellor Niccolo Machiavelli.

Except that Drucker whispered his cautions and his homilies on the imperative of moral leadership into the ears of a new aristocracy of CEOs and prime ministers rather than kings and princes.

Among the things he told them:

"One either meets or one works."

"So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work."

"There are very few bad situations that can't be solved by firing a passel of vice-presidents."

One thing securities analysts (and Drucker once was one) don't understand is business — that business makes products, not money ("Profit is a means, very much like oxygen to the human body ... but you don't exist for its sake").

"The unsuccessful misfit of diversification should be put out of its misery as fast as possible."

And, "Stock option plans reward the executive for doing the wrong thing. Instead of asking, `Are we making the right decision?' he asks, `How did we close today?' It is encouragement to loot the corporation."

As a self-described "social ecologist," Drucker had a lifelong fascination with how people interact within organizations, and how organizations relate to each other.

Improving those relationships — with guaranteed wages, lifetime employment and other progressive steps that have not been embraced — came to preoccupy Drucker, a Vienna native who fled the Nazis for the New World, and saw economics and business as a function of the larger society, not the overriding purpose of a community.

Thus, even after devoting a lifetime to the study of commerce, and serving as a handmaiden to managerial innovations for half a century, Drucker never was able to reconcile the baser motives of business with the social uplift its advocates claimed for it. From the Crash of '29 to the collapse of Enron Corp., commerce was too studded with ethical failure and intellectual shortcomings to be left to its own devices — which explains Drucker's defence of continued vigilant government regulation. "Although I believe in the free market," Drucker said, "I have serious reservations about capitalism."

Drucker was disdainful of the cult of CEO celebrity.

"I was brought up by the maxim that a gentleman only gets into the papers when he is born, when he marries, and when he dies," Drucker said in the late 1990s.

"If he gets into the papers more than that, he is no gentleman. I violated that rule very early, but never mind."

We don't.

Sigh. I don't know if we have some one to replace him.

My favourite aphorisms by him were:

"The only thing a degree certifies is that the person has sat for a long time."

And.

"BA stands for Bugger All, MBA stands for More Bugger All and PhD stands for Piled Higher and Deeper."

So long Peter. I, for one, will miss you.

 

[ABSTRUSE]

I found out this morning we lost another great one. I always regarded him a one of the world's premier heretics.



Sigh. I don't know if we have some one to replace him.

My favourite aphorisms by him were:

"The only thing a degree certifies is that the person has sat for a long time."

And.

"BA stands for Bugger All, MBA stands for More Bugger All and PhD stands for Piled Higher and Deeper."

So long Peter. I, for one, will miss you.

"The only thing a degree certifies is that the person has sat for a long time."

So true.

RIP Mr. D.

 

[BlackShanglan]

What one gets out of a degree depends very largely on what one puts into it. Evidently Mr. Drucker was clear on his own contribution.

 

[impressive]

What one gets out of a degree depends very largely on what one puts into it.

True that. However, the lay person doesn't have a clue whether Dr.Know-It-All invested in his degree or not.

Having cross-examined quite a few "expert" witnesses, I have reached the conclusion that alphabet soup following one's name is no indication of worth or intelligence.

 

[cantdog]

I agree. College itself is a strange experience. It is very different when you arrive at it directly from high school than it is later, as a 'non-traditional' student. There are many ways to complete that four- or five-year period.

A mind which is still alive, whatever its degrees, is always superior to one which has stopped growing.