Peter Drucker

Peter Ferdinand Drucker is widely known as the father of modern management. He was a writer, management consultant and university professor, his writing being focused on management-related literature. He made famous the term knowledge worker (one who works primarily with information or one who develops and uses knowledge in the workplace) and is thought to have accidentally conducted in the knowledge economy.

His work influenced Winston Churchill, Bill Gates, Jack Welch and the Japanese business establishment.

Drucker was the most important thinker of his time on how businesses ought to be managed and also was often called the world's most influential business guru. His groundbreaking work turned modern management theory into a serious discipline, and he influenced or created nearly every facet of its application, including decentralization, privatization, and empowerment, and has coined such terms as the “knowledge worker.” He examined how society as a whole functioned, and he probed the big forces-demographic and economic-relentlessly reshaping it. He explored how individuals can flourish and find fulfillment in what they do, professionally as well as personally.

Dr. Drucker cared not just about how business manages its resources, but also how public and private organizations operate morally and ethically within society. He respected the values of education, personal responsibility and businesses’ accountability to society. Dr. Drucker’s true legacy is his insistence on this value system, and its effect on business, society and individual lives.

What's more, he did all this without resorting to the bromides typical of so many authors whose works line the "management" shelf. Rather, Drucker saw management as a "liberal art," and he showered his writings (39 books, which have been translated into more than 30 languages, and many hundreds of articles for magazines and scholarly publications) with lessons from history, sociology, psychology, culture and religion. "There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer," he said 45 years ago.

Drucker then connected the dots between these disciplines in a way that few have before or since and, in the process, anticipated the future with an uncanny degree of insight and accuracy. "It is the gifted eye that discerns the pattern and rhythm of the motions in a complex drama of forces," said the British journalist H.N. Brailsford. "Peter Drucker has this rare gift and exercises it with some audacity."