The world's first (and best) management consultant, Peter Drucker, died last week. He was 95. The Economist has published a lengthy article about him, subtitled "The one management thinker every educated person should read" and I couldn't agree more. Here's the introduction:
ON NOVEMBER 11th, a few days short of his 96th birthday, Peter Drucker died. The most important management thinker of the past century, he wrote about 40 books (the last, “The Effective Executive in Action” will be published in January) and thousands of articles. He was a guru to the world's corporate elite, not just in his native Europe and his adoptive America, but also in Japan and the developing world (one devoted South Korean businessman even changed his first name to Mr Drucker). And he never rested in his mission to persuade the world that management matters—that, in his own rather portentous formula, “Management is the organ of institutions...the organ that converts a mob into an organisation, and human efforts into performance.”
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