Peter F. Drucker was born in Vienna, when the city was still the glittering centre of the Habsburg monarchy. He grew up in a home which was a meeting place for intellectuals, high government officials and scientists; the economists Schumpeter, Mises and Hayek were also regular guests. At the end of the twenties Drucker went to Germany, where he worked as a journalist. He was also politically active in conservative circles in Germany which at the end of the Weimar Republic attempted to prevent a takeover of the National Socialists. In 1933 he emigrated to England, where he worked in banking and took part in the legendary Keynes seminars; shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War he settled in the USA.

There, at the beginning of the forties, he began his actual career: as a consultant to General Motors and other large corporations he created the foundations of modern management. In the following decades Drucker foresaw and helped shape all of the important developments in economics and management: from decentralization and privatisation to the emergence of the knowledge society. Today, Drucker is considered worldwide to be the "doyen of business consultants" and the "the man who invented management" (The New York Times).

Since the 1930s Peter Drucker has written more than thirty books which were translated in almost as many languages, the total number of copies published has reached six million. A number of these books have become classics of management literature like The Practice of Management, in which Drucker developed "Management by Objectives" (MbO) in the mid-fifties, a management concept based on objective-setting and self-supervision which initiated a break with the purely authoritarian leadership principle in most businesses. A further classic of management literature is Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, a voluminous compendium of business leadership in the mid-eighties. The most successful of Drucker's books is The Effective Executive, a slender manual of 1966, which Newt Gingrich, while serving as Republican Speaker of the House, made required reading for every newly sworn-in representative.

Along with books on management questions, Drucker has also published a number of works in which he has dealt with general societal developments. Already at the end of the fifties, in Landmarks of Tomorrow, Drucker was speaking of a "post modern society." A decade later, in The Age of Discontinuity, he foresaw a replacement of industrial work with "knowledge work." And in Post-Capitalist Society, his last major work of social theory of 1993, he described a development which would end not with capital, but with knowledge providing the basis of society.

Part of the success of Drucker's books and lectures is due to his treatment of economics and management in the broad context of the humanities and his constant linking of hard economic data and facts to references in history, philosophy, literature and art. Marshall McLuhan was also the first to point out that the background for his interdisciplinary and universal approach was to be found in Vienna, where Drucker was born on November 19, 1909.

>> Drucker's childhood and youth in Vienna