ESPRIT Counsellors

In Memoriam Peter F. Drucker

On the 11th of November, eight days from his 96th birthday, Peter Drucker passed away at his home in California. Thinking of him I associate his name to the names of Einstein and Freud. For me, ever since my years at university he has always been there. At times he was tough study material, a source of insight or source of inspiration. To me he was not a writer but a man who had so much to say over so many decades, that he couldn't but put his thoughts on paper. (Here you can find a list of Drucker's books.) (picture AP)

His 39th book, "The Effective Executive in Action. A Journal for getting the right things done" will be released next January. Almost as if he knew it would be his last book, he builds upon a very popular book of his that was published forty years ago in 1966 called "The Effective Executive". It couldn't have been more symbolic for his thinking. Drucker knew that thriving organizations depend on effective executives.

All his life he tried to make us understand what that means. He described his vision from multiple vantage points and along this route he constructed Modern Management Theory. He even 'handcrafted' the necessary building blocks to do so. He pointed to leadership, showed us innovation, explained us change, taught us entrepreneurship and stressed the importance of knowledge. And most of all he kept painstakingly going on clarifying his ultimate message that the source of these building blocks is: people.

Apparently this is a message that is extremely difficult to understand or there are extremely few effective executives. To make his message come across, Drucker gave us no less than eighteen books on the profession of management. And still there may be timeliness to his ideas and writings. Not because Drucker did predictions, but because the world does such a bad job in applying his ideas.

Drucker was considered a visionary because he understood the single most basic rule in business and management: employees are the key to success. In one word: people. All the rest follows from that because every decision, every idea, strategy, marketing plan, innovation and so on are thought of, conceived, decided and executed by people.

Peter Drucker still moves people around the world. But when will corporate myopia be replaced by real understanding of this man's message?

Who can take such a man's place?