2005年NPR美国国家公共电台十二月-Management Expert Drucker Dies at 95

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The legendary¹ political economist² Peter Drucker has died at age 95. Drucker wrote more than 3 dozen books and countless³ articles, but for such a prolific⁴ writer, he offered rather pithy⁵ advice.

The most important thing is to know what you're good at, and very few people know that. All of us know what they're not good at.

NPR's Jack⁶ Speer has this appreciation⁷ of the man known as the the father of modern management .

Born in Vienna in 1909, Peter Drucker was a child of privilege. His parents counted among their friends, such luminaries⁸ as Sigmund Freud. As a young man, Drucker earned a law degree, he went on to obtain his doctorate⁹ in international law at University of Frankfort, though he always maintained that was more to please his father than himself. Troubled by the rise of the Nazis¹¹, Drucker moved to London to work for a merchant bank. Jack Beatty, a Drucker biographer told NPR's Todd Monk¹², the Nazi¹⁰ period had a lasting¹³ influence.

"He just got out of Europe before the Third Reich and he is conscious that he's had this extraordinary luck, and I think that's been a, that he's been spared really. And I think that this also has affected¹⁴ him, he feels that he owes the world something."

Drucker immigrated¹⁵ to America in 1937 and it was in his adopted country that he did his most influential¹⁶ work. In his very first book, the End of Economic Man, Peter Drucker analysed the causes of totalitarianism, the insecurity, fear, depression and unemployment, the demons¹⁷, as he put it, that created the conditions for the emergence¹⁸ of the dictator. Joseph Maciariello was a friend and colleague who now teaches at the Drucker School of Management in Claremont, California. He explains how Peter Drucker was able to reshape modern management theory.

"He's been a critic but from the inside. He's been a friend of business. So he's spoken eloquently¹⁹, um, um, to executives about how to improve their performance while also being a critic, so yeah, that's it, that's a tough, tough act."

Today the idea that business management is a field worthy²⁰ of serious academic study is uncontroversial. But before Peter Drucker, there really was no theory of management. His 18 months in-depth examination of General Motors led to the publication in 1946 of one of his most influential works, Concept of the Corporation. The book was disavowed by GM management. Within a decade, Drucker published the work that would seal his reputation as a business guru, the Practice of Management. Peter Senge, a senior lecturer of MIT who worked with Drucker explains why the book holds up even today.

"One of the reasons his books in general as well as the classic one in 1954 have held up is he has a remarkable²¹ ability to kind of intellectualize from a very practical foundation, so I think he's had a big impact on managers, not just academics who have read his material, because they get a feeling this is a person who kind of, knows what my life is like, knows what it feels like to actually be in an organization."

Drucker counseled managers and union leaders to give employees more control over their working environment, he held the purpose of business was to create customers and businesses should be profitable, but insisted employees were a resource, and not a cost, Drucker disdained²² business fads²³, things like stock options for executives. In a 1990 interview with Bill Moyers on PBS, he summed up what defines a truly effective manager.

"Leadership is performance and not personality. What you accomplish and what you enforce others to perform, that does a great function of, you're making incredible demands, ur, not making it easy for people."

And Peter Drucker did not exempt²⁴ himself from those incredible demands, writing well into his nineties , often on a manual typewriter. In a 2004 article for the Harvard Business Review, Drucker had some advice for today's business leaders, listen first and speak last. Peter Drucker, according to those who knew him, was perhaps the concealment²⁵ listener.

Jack Speer, NPR News, Washington.