Peter Ferdinand Drucker, popularly known as Peter Drucker, was born in Vienna, Austria, Hungary, on November 19, 1909, and died on November 11, 2005, in a liberal Lutheran protestant household. He was an Austrian-American Management Guru and author whose writings avidly contributed to the practical and philosophical foundations of modern management theory and education.
Drucker’s mother, Caroline Bondi, was a doctor, and his father, Adolf Drucker, was a lawyer and a respected civil servant. He was nurtured in a home where thought leaders like Joseph Schumpeter, Friedrich Hayek, and Hans Kelsen (his uncle) would assemble to discuss emerging ideas.
Drucker graduated in 1927 and got job opportunities post-World War I in Vienna. He moved to Hamburg, Germany, and worked as an apprentice in a cotton trading company, then became a journalist writing for ‘The Austrian Economist.’ Drucker then moved to Frankfurt for a job and studies at the Daily Frankfurter General-Anzeiger. There, he earned a doctorate in international law and public law from the Goethe University Frankfurt in 1931. In 1933, Drucker left Germany for England. He worked for an insurance company in London and then as the chief economist at a private bank.
He married Doris Schmitz, his friend from the University of Frankfurt, in 1934. They permanently relocated to the United States in 1937, where he became a university professor, freelance writer, and business consultant. In 1943, Drucker became a US citizen and flourished as a distinguished teacher, as a professor of politics and philosophy at Bennington College from 1942 to 1949, then twenty-two years at New York University as a professor of management from 1950 to 1971.
Drucker went to California in 1971, where he developed one of the country’s first executive MBA programs for working professionals at Claremont Graduate University. From 1971 until his death, he was the Clarke Professor of Social Science and Management at Claremont. Claremont Graduate University’s management school was named the Peter F. Drucker Graduate School of Management in his honor in 1987. Drucker taught his last class in 2002 at 92 and was a consultant till his nineties. He died on November 11, 2005, in Claremont, California, at 95. Drucker’s wife, Doris, died in October 2014 at 103. They had four children.
Drucker’s career as a business thinker took off in 1942 when his initial writings on politics and society won him access to the internal workings of General Motors, one of the largest companies in the world at that time. He shared his idea with Donaldson Brown, the mastermind behind the administrative controls at GM. In 1943, Brown invited him to conduct what might be called a “political audit,” a two-year social-scientific analysis of the corporation. Drucker attended every board meeting, interviewed employees, and analyzed production and decision-making processes. The resulting book was ‘Concept of the Corporation,’ which GM’s chairman Alfred Sloan ignored.
Books and Writings
Drucker authored 39 books, two of which are novels, and one is an autobiography (Adventures of a Bystander) from 1978. His books have been translated into more than forty-two languages. He is the co-author of a book on the Japanese painting series, which includes educational films on management. He penned a regular column in the Wall Street Journals for a decade and contributed to the Harvard Business Review and The Economist. His popularity in Japan is compared with that of his contemporary, W. Edwards Deming.