The Final Thoughts
Of Management's
Big Thinker

Most management gurus are much of a muchness. They take minor insights and spin them into grand theories. They sprinkle pixie dust over every company they encounter (remember all those glowing profiles of Enron?). And they do it all in clodhopping prose.

Peter Drucker is a notable exception. He is not only the most influential management thinker of the postwar era (he died on Nov. 11, 2005). He is also the one management thinker that all educated people -- including those who have nothing but disdain for management "science" -- should spend some time reading.

It is too much to claim that Drucker invented modern management. But he did more than anybody else to shape it. Drucker predicted most of the great management changes of the past 50 years: the rise of "knowledge workers"; the collapse of efficiency-obsessed Taylorism; the fashion for workplace "empowerment" (a word, incidentally, that he loathed). He also advised most of the world's greatest companies. Drucker was at the heart of not one but two shake-ups of General Electric. In the 1950s, he advised the company to decentralize. In the 1980s, he told Jack Welch that the company should be No. 1 or No. 2 in any business it was in or it should get out.

Drucker's genius lay in his refusal to acknowledge conventional boundaries. He was as much a sociologist as a management thinker, obsessed with the effect of big structural changes on organizations (e.g., population trends, the changing role of women). He had as much influence on Japanese business as on American (there is a Druckerian Club outside Tokyo). He was just as interested in the management of civic organizations as business ones.

"The Definitive Drucker" sounds a lot of alarm bells. The word "definitive" promises too much. How can a man who wrote 40 books be summarized in 289 pages? The foreword by a big-name businessman (A.G. Lafley of Procter & Gamble) looks like a marketing ploy, whatever its merits. Most troubling of all, "The Definitive Drucker" was not in fact written by Peter Drucker himself but by Elizabeth Haas Edersheim, a management consultant.

In fact, the book is better than you might expect. Ms. Edersheim conducted numerous interviews with Drucker in the 16 months before his death. "I had hoped for one hour of his time," she writes of their first meeting. "We talked for two." Thereafter they spent countless hours talking in Drucker's modest ranch house in Claremont, Calif., ranging over everything from the rise of Google to the future of CEOs. Ms. Edersheim read and reread Drucker's books. And she talked to a large number of Drucker acolytes, such as Jack Welch, Jim Collins and Mr. Lafley himself. The result is not vintage Drucker, still less the definitive Drucker. But Ms. Edersheim does give us a good idea of what Drucker was thinking about some of the biggest management changes of the new century.

Drucker believed that the challenges facing companies now were more dramatic than anything he had seen in his long life. Consumers were gaining unprecedented power. Global competition had gone from wind level to storm level to hurricane level. Clever new companies were inventing not just new products but new human needs. (Who knew that it was impossible to live without carrying 10,000 songs around in your pocket?) Seven of the 10 companies that have seen the biggest growth in share value over the past five years did not exist a couple of decades ago.

To thrive in this new environment, Drucker claimed, companies would have to rethink everything. They would need to partner with "rivals" and consult with customers so that they could view themselves from the "outside in"; they would have to tap new sources of talent, such as retirees, and focus fiercely on their core competencies. "If it's not in your front room, then make it someone else's front room," he liked to say.

As for individuals, they are now in charge of their own progress. "Knowledge workers are neither bosses nor workers," he said, "but rather something in between -- resources who have responsibility for developing their most important resource, brainpower, and who also need to take more control of their own careers." In the 21st century every man is not so much a king as a CEO of his own career.

Here Drucker was a model as well as an analyst: He continually reinvented himself. He was a prophet of big organizations in the 1940s and a fan of entrepreneurship in the 1970s. He kept his mind fresh by taking up a new subject every few years: When I visited him in 1997 he was deeply involved in the study of early medieval Paris.

Ms. Edersheim is not Drucker, of course. She tends to focus narrowly on business whereas Drucker ranged over all sorts of institutions. (He was one of the inspirations behind the mega-church movement, for example.) She produces fairly predictable examples -- the praise for JetBlue is particularly unfortunate, given its recent troubles -- whereas Drucker was delightfully unpredictable, illustrating business alliances with references to Jane Austen. Still, the insights in "The Definitive Drucker" can be illuminating, not least because Ms. Edersheim allows a bright light to shine out, even now, from the mind of Peter Drucker himself.