End of Era in Management studies 

Peter Drucker Passes Away at 95

Peter F Drucker, the father of management studies as well know it, died on Friday morning of natural causes at his home in Claremont, California.  He was 95. 

An Austrian-born journalist and intellectual, Drucker is considered one of the world’s foremost management theorists and the inventor of management as a field of study.  He was the first to recognize that dedicated employees are key to the success of any corporation, and marketing and innovation should come before worries about finances.  His motivational techniques were used by executives at some of the biggest names in corporate America, including Intel Corp.  and Sears, Roebuck & Co.

In the early 1940s, General Motors invited Drucker to study its inner workings.  That experience led to his first management book, Concept of the Corporation, in 1946.  In a career spanning nearly 75 years, Drucker authored 39 books, from the end of the Economic Man to his last book.  The Effective Executive in Action.  That volume, co-authored with Joseph Maciariello, will be published in early 2006.  Born in Vienna, and educated there and to England, Drucker received a doctorate in international law while working as a newspaper reporter in Frankfurt, Germany.  He remained in Germany until 1933, when one of his essays was banned by the Nazi regime.  For a time, he worked as an economist for a bank in London, them moved to the US in 1937.  In 2002, Drucker was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

He taught politics and philosophy at Bennington College in Vermont and for more than 20 years was a professor of management at New York University’s graduate business school.  Beginning in 1971, he taught a course for mid-career executives at Claremont Graduate School in California, which named its business school after him.  He had not actively taught classes since 2003, but remained a consultant to the school until his death.  Management, he once said, “deals with people, their values, their growth and development, social structure, the community and even with spiritual concerns”.  He first proposed the revolutionary central component of his philosophy, the view that people were an organisation’s most valuable resource, in the 1950s.  In fact, he foresaw the onset of what he called the “age of the knowledge worker”, a Claremont Graduate University spokesman Bryan Schneider said.  He also demonstrated a keen eye for observing management and business trends, in the 1950s predicting the coming importance of computers, in the 1960s predicting the competitive advantage of the Far East, and in the 1990s predicting a backlash against high executive paychecks.