Peter Drucker was born in Vienna in 1909. He emigrated to the US in 1937, where he worked as an economist, a journalist and a philosophy professor before finding a career as a professor of management and social sciences.
He is best known for establishing management as its own discipline through his writing and his work as a consultant to major corporations. In the words of Tom Peters "no true discipline of management existed before Drucker."
Setting objectives, organizing, motivating and communicating, establishing measurements of performance and developing people are his five basic principles of management.
Since 1971 he has been Clarke Professor of Social Science in California and has had 24 books published since 1939, his first book being "The End of Economic Man."
Society, community, family are all conserving institutions. They try to maintain stability, and to prevent, or at least to slow down, change. But the organization of the post-capitalist society of organizations is a destabilizer. Because its function is to put knowledge to work -- on tools, processes, and products; on work; on knowledge itself -- it must be organized for constant change
The most important, and indeed the truly unique, contribution of management in the 20th century was the fifty-fold increase in the productivity of the MANUAL WORKER in manufacturing. The most important contribution management needs to make in the 21st century is similarly to increase the productivity of KNOWLEDGE WORK and the KNOWLEDGE WORKER.
Increasingly, command and control is being replaced by or intermixed with
all kinds of relationships: alliances, joint ventures, minority
participations, partnerships, know-how, and marketing agreements-all
relationships in which no one controls and no one commands. These
relationships have to be based on a common understanding of objectives,
policies, and strategies; on teamwork; and on persuasion-or they do no work
at all.
In the knowledge society the most probable assumption and certainly the assumption on which all organizations have to conduct their affairs is that they need the knowledge worker far more than the knowledge worker needs them.
The knowledge worker cannot be supervised closely or in detail. He can only be helped. But he must direct himself, and he must direct himself towards performance and contribution, that is, toward effectiveness.
If you are interested in Knowledge Management, the
Knowledge Café
or the role of conversation in organizational life then you my be interested in this online book I am writing on
Conversational Leadership
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