PUTTING THE CORPI IN CORPORATIONS:

Peter F. Drucker, a Pioneer in Social and Management Theory, Is Dead at 95 (BARNABY J. FEDER, 11/12/05, NY Times)

Peter F. Drucker, the political economist and author, whose view that big business and nonprofit enterprises were the defining innovation of the 20th century led him to pioneering social and management theories, died yesterday at his home in Claremont, Calif. He was 95.

His death was announced by Claremont Graduate University.

Mr. Drucker thought of himself, first and foremost, as a writer and teacher, though he eventually settled on the term "social ecologist." He became internationally renowned for urging corporate leaders to agree with subordinates on objectives and goals and then get out of the way of decisions about how to achieve them.

He challenged both business and labor leaders to search for ways to give workers more control over their work environment. He also argued that governments should turn many functions over to private enterprise and urged organizing in teams to exploit the rise of a technology-astute class of "knowledge workers."

Mr. Drucker staunchly defended the need for businesses to be profitable but he preached that employees were a resource, not a cost. His constant focus on the human impact of management decisions did not always appeal to executives, but they could not help noticing how it helped him foresee many major trends in business and politics.

PETER F. DRUCKER | 1909-2005: Prolific Father of Modern Management (James Flanigan and Thomas S. Mulligan, November 12, 2005, LA Times)

Drucker was often called the "father of modern management." But on the occasion of his 90th birthday, he described his life work much more simply:

"I looked at people, not at machines or buildings," he said. That approach led to nearly three dozen books and thousands of articles that formed nothing less than a guide to the 20th century economy.

The former newspaperman did not think up economic theories or elaborate systems of business operation. Rather he looked at people working, put them in historical context and saw a new liberal art: management.

"Unlike many philosophers, he spoke in plain language that resonated with ordinary managers," Intel Corp. co-founder Andrew S. Grove said in a statement. "Consequently, simple statements from him have influenced untold numbers of daily actions; they did mine over decades."

General Motors Corp., which invited Drucker to study its corporate structure in 1943, provided his laboratory and his epiphany. He was then a professor at Bennington College in Vermont and author of two books on society and industry.

At GM in wartime, Drucker saw "the corporation as human effort" — "people of diverse skills and knowledges working together in a large organization," he wrote in "Concept of the Corporation," the 1946 book that emerged from his two years of studying GM.

It was something new in world history, different from the "command and control" methods of organizing labor that had characterized the building of the pyramids or Napoleon's army or even Henry Ford's assembly line.

"The overseer of the unskilled peasants who dragged stone for the pyramids did not concern himself with morale or motivation," Drucker wrote.

But modern management is different, he said. "Its task is to make people capable of joint performance, to make their strengths effective and their weaknesses irrelevant," he said in various ways in his 18 books on the profession of management.

Drucker saw management as a necessity for the society of organizations that existed in the 20th century. It was a discipline vital not only for commercial business, but also for hospitals, churches, labor unions and youth groups.

Drucker "was like the exceptionally insightful anthropologist who visits a remote tribe and understands things about the tribe that the tribe itself doesn't understand," said Michael Useem, management professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Yet the manager is still rare who views the live bodies at his corporation as more than obstacles to the smooth implementation of the plans on his latest power point presentation.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 12, 2005 10:46 AM