Peter F. Drucker spent his 70-odd year career teaching, consulting, writing and asking questions. Fundamental questions to guide managers in the awareness of their responsibilities and the execution of their tasks. Having had virtually no hands-on management experience himself, he prided himself that he was helping people to find out people what to do, yet not how to do it.
When Peter Drucker began his work in the thirties, management as a discipline was virtually unknown.
Many of the business concepts we talk about today (and so often take for granted) can be traced back to Peter Drucker. Management was not a worthy subject of study in the first half of the century. At the start of his career, he found it extremely difficult to find books on management... so he wrote a few himself (about 40 of them).
Common modern business concepts and practices, like management by objectives, management by walking around, empowerment, people as an asset not a cost, doing the right things, leadership by example and countless others are all described, generally for the first time, in Drucker's writings.
In 1981, when Jack Welch (CEO and Chairman of GE, Forbes CEO of the Century) began his mission at the helm of GE, he went to see Peter Drucker for advice on running the conglomerate. He came away with only two questions. Yet those two questions were going to define everything he did in the following 20 years until his retirement in 2001:
- If you were not already in the business you are in, would you enter it today?
- What are you going to do about it?
Whereupon Welch set off to sell hundreds of businesses of the GE Empire, restructuring, redefining and strengthening the organisation to 25 times its value.
And this is how Drucker described himself:
"My greatest strength as a consultant is to be ignorant and ask a few questions."
To me, that sounds eerily like what a certain Socrates said two and a half thousand years ago.
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