Peter Drucker – 1909-2005

“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.” – Peter Drucker.
It’s a very sad day. Famed management genius, Author and believer in keeping it simple, Peter Drucker, passed away this past Friday. He was ninety five years old.
Here is his obituary which was grabbed from Google News:
“Peter Drucker, revered as the father of modern management for his numerous books and articles stressing innovation, entrepreneurship and strategies for dealing with a changing world, died Friday at age 95.
Drucker died of natural causes at his home in Claremont, east of Los Angeles.
‘He is purely and simply the most important developer of effective management and of effective public policy in the 20th century,’ former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Friday.
‘In the more than 30 years that I’ve studied him, talked with him and learned from him, he has been invaluable and irreplaceable.’
Drucker was considered a management visionary for his recognition that dedicated employees are key to the success of any corporation, and marketing and innovation should come before worries about finances.
His motivational techniques have been used by executives at some of the biggest companies in corporate America, including Intel Corp. and Sears, Roebuck & Co.
In 2002, U.S. President George W. Bush honoured Drucker with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Business Week magazine hailed him as ‘the most enduring management thinker of our time,’ and Forbes magazine featured him on a 1997 cover under the headline: Still the Youngest Mind. He has been called ‘the world’s foremost pioneer of management theory’ and a champion of concepts such as management by objective and decentralization.
In the early 1940s, General Motors invited Drucker to study its inner workings. That experience led to his 1946 management book Concept of the Corporation. He went on to write more than 30 books.
Drucker was born in Vienna, and educated there and in England. He 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, then moved to the United States in 1937.
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 midcareer executives at Claremont Graduate School in California, which named its business school after him.
Drucker’s management books included: The Effective Executive, 1966; Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, 1974; and Managing in a Time of Great Change, 1995.
In 2004, he put out The Daily Drucker: 366 Days of Insight and Motivation for Getting the Right Things Done.
He also wrote scores of articles for the academic and popular press, two novels and a 1979 autobiography, Adventures of a Bystander.
Drucker is survived by his wife, Doris, and four children.”
I keep a copy of The Daily Drucker nearby and try to read from it daily.
“The best way to predict the future is to create it.” – Peter F. Drucker.