Richard Ellsworth

Peter Drucker’s enduring legacy - and certainly the legacy of the Drucker School - is the values embodied by his work. Peter’s contributions have been so significant and varied in part because of the integrity of their foundation. They are grounded in his view of management as a liberal art, his high view of humankind and his ability to see and remain focused on the fundamentals. Their impact is a consequence of his courage to “call them as he saw them,” and to take unpopular and contrary positions. Management as a Liberal Art. A central strength of Peter’s work is that his agile mind and depth of knowledge enabled him to examine management through insights gleaned from many of humankind’s most important fields of thought. He wove ideas from economics, political theory, history, psychology, philosophy and sociology to create a holistic tapestry of management and society. This enables him to see what others fail to see. Also, precisely because his insights were grounded in the fundamentals of the human condition, they have an enduring quality.

A High View of Humankind and of the Practice of Management. A high moral tone and an abiding belief in the individual permeate his writings. By focusing on what people can do, not on what they cannot do, he crafted a way of managing designed to enable people to become more of what they are capable of becoming. His work was dedicated to unleashing the latent potential in all people. Indeed, he considered this as a central responsibility of management – and integral to a manager’s responsibility for organizational performance. Consequently, Peter saw management as a noble calling - one that is critical to the creation of an effective and efficient society.

A Clear, Disciplined View of Reality. In many ways, Peter Drucker’s gift for seeing patterns others could not see was the result of hard work, the disciplined examination of “what is,” a search for patterns among these facts, and a willingness to face the reality they imply. Not swayed by passing fads, he grounded his thought in enduring principles. His courage enabled him to express contrarian views, a nd his delight in provoking others to think for themselves added an edge to his writing and teaching. A Coherent, Cohesive Management Philosophy. Although I expect that Peter would have recoiled at the use of the word “philosophy” to describe the totality of his management thought, I can think of no better word. His faith in the individual led to a view that the most effective, innovative, high-performance organizations result from each person’s self-control and the assumption of responsibility for one’s results. Self-control requires each individual to exercise the self-disciplined initiative to define objectively their contributions to organizational performance, to identify the desired future results of their actions to produce these contributions, to measure future results against actual results and learn from this process. Drucker initially espoused this responsibility-based philosophy of management nearly a decade before Douglas McGregor wrote about “Theory Y” and more than 30 years before the word “empowerment” crept into the management lexicon.

This legacy of values - and the commitment to the relevance of theory to practice - provides the foundation for the continued building of a school with a unique, greatly needed competency that will truly serve the betterment of humankind. As knowledge and the “knowledge worker” have become increasingly important to competitive advantage and as both the pace of change and degree of complexity have accelerated, the values underlying Drucker’s view of management have become even more relevant and more urgently needed. They feel right. They are noble. They inspire action.

And they produce results.