Peter Drucker is no more

One of the foremost management thinkers in the business community, Peter Drucker is no more. He was 95. Being a management student, I heard of Peter Drucker in two contexts, Marketing and Strategy.

Peter Drucker ideas deeply shaped the way business community used to work and modern corporation used to run. Known as the father of modern management died out of prolonged illness.

In his life time Peter Drucker authored close to 35 books on management which became hall mark among the management community. The landmark ones are : The concept of the corporation (1946), The Practice of Management (1954) and The effective executive (1964). These became standard at the business schools throughout the world and serve as a standard reference for any one aiming to understand strategy.

He emphasized that, rather than being a machine, the modern corporation was an organization of human beings whose management and interaction are crucial to the business' success.
That and subsequent books garnered Drucker a reputation as a "futurist" in the business world, a person who read before anyone else the trends and needs of business and the economy.

Peter Drucker coined the term "Knowledge Worker" about a decade back and said that these are the people who will be at the forefront of any organization and contribute to its success. Also the term "Management by Objectives" coined by him took a front seat when deciding control systems for an organization in the 21st century.

In the early 1950s, when other business leaders figured the worldwide market for computers was in the single digits, he predicted that computer technology would thoroughly transform business. In 1961, he alerted his followers to the rise of Japan as an industrial power, and two decades later, he warned of its impending economic stagnation. In 1997, he predicted a backlash to burgeoning executive pay, saying, "In the next economic downturn, there will be an outbreak of bitterness and contempt for the super-corporate chieftains who pay themselves millions."

To sum it up Mckinsey Quarterly described Peter Drucker as the management guru to whom other gurus kowtow.