Farewell Peter Ferdinand Drucker (November 19, 1909 – November 11, 2005)

Peter Drucker the founder of management science and origionater of the concept of the “knowledge worker”, author of more than 41 books, died on the 11th November 2005 at 95 years of age. There is a timeline outlining his life and achievements available here.

Some of the favorite Druckerisms from Leadership. Now. are:

• What everyone knows is usually wrong.
• Popularity is not leadership. Results are. Leadership is not rank, privileges, titles, or money. It is responsibility. There may be ‘born leaders,’ but there surely are too few to depend on them.
• Leadership is not magnetic personality – that can just as well be a glib tongue. It is not ‘making friends and influencing people’ – that is flattery. Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to higher sights, the raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.
• Leadership is the lifting of a man’s vision to higher sights, the raising of a man’s performance to a higher standard and the building of a man’s personality beyond its normal limitations.
• Of all the decisions an executive makes, none is as important as the decisions about people, because they determine the performance capacity of the organization.
• In today’s marketplace, productivity is the true competitive advantage.
• The effectiveness of an organization depends on work being done at the lowest possible organization level.
• The one truly effective way to cut costs is to cut out an activity altogether. There is little point in trying to do cheaply what should not be done at all.
• The best way to predict the future is to create it.

A few of my favorite from Marketing Headhunter.com are:

• There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer. He alone gives employment.
• It is easier to raise the performance of one leader than it is to raise the performance of a whole mass.
• You cannot prevent a major catastrophe, but you can build an organization that is battle-ready, where people trust one another. In military training, the first rule is to instill soldiers with trust in their officers — because without trust, they won’t fight.
• Listening (the first competence of leadership) is not a skill, it is a discipline. All you have to do is keep your mouth shut.
• Luck never built a business. Prosperity and growth come only to the business that systematically finds and exploits its potential.
• There are keys to success in managing bosses. First, put down on a piece of paper a “boss list,” everyone to whom you are accountable. Next, go to each person on the list and ask, “What do I do and what do my people do that helps you do your job?” And, “What do we do that makes your life more difficult?”
• A decision is a commitment to action. No decision has, in fact, been made until carrying it out has become somebody’s responsibility.
• It’s much easier to sell the Brooklyn Bridge than to give it away. Nobody trusts you if you offer something for free.
• Just go out and make yourself useful.

And this Drucker quote from Management Craft:

“In every executive job, a large part of the time must therefore be wasted on things which, thought they apparently have to be done, contribute nothing or little. Yet most of the tasks of the executive require, for minimum effectiveness, a fairly large quantum of time. To spend in one stretch less than this minimum is sheer waste. One accomplishes nothing and has to begin all over again… To be effective, every knowledge worker, and especially every executive, therefore needs to be able to dispose of time in fairly large chunks. To have dribs and drabs of time at his disposal will not be sufficient even if the total is an impressive number of hours.” – Peter Drucker, the Effective Executive, p. 29

What’s most interesting to me about Peter Drucker, is how his influence and productivity increased as he aged. I took a list of his books and the dates they were published as listed on Wikipedia (listed below), the interesting thing is, he published more than 70% of his books between the ages of 61 and 95! Let no one say you’re ever too old!!!

The End of Economic Man: The Origins of Totalitarianism(1939)

The Future of Industrial Man (1942)

Concept of the Corporation (1945)

The New Society (1950)

The Practice of Management (1954)

America’s Next 20 Years (1957)

Landmarks of Tomorrow: A Report on the New ‘Post-Modern’ World (1959)

Power and Democracy in America (1961)

Managing for Results: Economic Tasks and Risk-Taking Decisions (1964)

The Effective Executive (1966)

The Age of Discontinuity (1968)

Technology, Management and Society (1970)

Men, Ideas and Politics (1971)

Management: Tasks, Responsibilities and Practices (1973)

The Unseen Revolution: How the Pension Fund Came to America (1976)

An Introductory View of Management (1977)

Adventures of a Bystander (1979)

Song of the Brush: Japanese Painting from the Sanso Collection (1979)

Managing in Turbulent Times (1980)

Toward the Next Economics and Other Essays (1981)

The Changing World of the Executive (1982)

The Temptation to Do Good (1984)

Innovation and Entrepreneurship: Practice and Principles (1985)

The Frontiers of Management (1986)

The New Realities (1989)

Managing the Non-Profit Organization: Practices and Principles (1990)

Managing for the Future: The 1990s and Beyond (1992)

The Post-Capitalist Society (1993)

The Ecological Vision: Reflections on the American Condition (1993)

The Theory of the Business (1994)

Managing in a Time of Great Change (1995)

Drucker on Asia: A Dialogue Between Peter Drucker and Isao Nakauchi (1997)

Peter Drucker on the Profession of Management (1998)

Management Challenges for the 21st Century (1999)

The Essential Drucker (2001)

Leading in a Time of Change: What it Will Take to Lead Tomorrow (2001; with Peter Senge)

The Effective Executive Revised (2002)

Managing in the Next Society (2002)

A Functioning Society (2003)

The Daily Drucker (2004)

Managing Oneself (2005)

Lastly, The Wall Street Journal has a good selection of opinion pieces by Peter F. Drucker available….

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