ANCIENT& not so ancient WISDOM
offering a weekly positive perspective

April 22, 2004

The best way to predict your future is to create it. 

- Peter Drucker (1909 - )

Drucker was born in 1909 in Vienna, Austria. He was educated in Austria and England. He earned his doctorate in public and international law while working as a newspaper reporter in Frankfurt, Germany. 

He worked as an economist for an international bank in London, until he entered the United States in 1937. He began his teaching career as professor of politics and philosophy at Bennington College in Vermont, and he was professor of management at the Graduate Business School of New York University for more than twenty years.

Since 1971, Peter Drucker has been Clarke Professor of Social Sciences at Claremont Graduate University in California. Its Graduate Management School was named after him in 1984.

Drucker is the author of more than thirty books, which deal with society, economics, politics and management. He has also written a novel, an autobiography and a book on Japanese painting. He is the recipient of many awards and honorary degrees and is Honorary Chairman of the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management. He has made four series of educational films based on his management books. He is an editorial columnist for the Wall Street Journal and a frequent contributor to the Harvard Business Review and other periodicals. 

Peter Drucker's first great contribution was to focus on management as a discipline.

In The Concept of the Corporation (1946), Drucker explained how and why decentralization worked. He stated that decentralization was good because it created small groups where people felt their contribution was important.

In The Effective Executive (1967), Drucker states the purpose of a business is to create a customer and a manager's main tasks are:

- to set objectives
- to organize
- to motivate and communicate
- to measure results
- to develop people

What Drucker said should be created is a workplace where workers are trusted to get the job done without too much supervision, where they know what they need to do and are clear about how it will be measured and how they will be rewarded.

In reference to creating customers, Drucker says, 

"Companies may know a good deal about their customers. They know nothing, as a rule, about their non-customers -- the people who should be our customers but buy from someone else. Why do they do that? And yet it is the non-customer where important changes always start first." 

Wishing you great and continued success!

Sincerely,