Peter Drucker

A great man has gone. The greatest man in the history of management, in fact. That can only mean Peter Drucker, who has just died at the age of 95. I’ve known Peter, and enormously liked him, for nearly forty years. He had more wisdom than anybody I’ve ever met and possessed a generosity of spirit that made him a marvellous friend and splendid teacher - at whose feet sat many of the business greats of the second half of the 20th century.

Yet Peter never ran a company or a business, and never worked as an employee for a great corporation. His monumental, apparently inside, knowledge of management, was largely acquired from the outside; but this was no disadvantage, rather an asset. It gave him a detachment and independence that made many pragmatic breakthroughs that have profoundly affected all management and all managers. Indeed, he practically invented the subject, which dates back to a book he wrote in 1954 - The Practice of Management.

The title tells the whole story. As writer and teacher (he was a university professor as well as top-level consultant and journalist) Drucker had no rival, because he concentrated on strong, straightforward ideas that could be clearly expressed and tested. An example is his famous distinction between efficiency and effectiveness. The first means ‘doing things right’, which is all well and good, but the second means ‘doing the right things’, which is much better - and makes fortunes.

As a speaker, he was no Cicero. Up on the stage, he would sit, usually on the edge of a table, and talk, without visual aids or notes, and without much emphasis. But the uninterrupted flow of ideas, explanations, advice and anecdotes held the audience spellbound - as I could see from their faces when I from time to time chaired one of his sell-out sessions. He presented the chair with no problems, finishing each session exactly on time, without having consulted the watch in his hand.

The anecdotes were terrific, ranging over the whole span of history. Peter’s phenomenal memory held the key. I once served as go-between for his first foray into Brazil. Demand for places was so great that the organisers had to arrange a second day. Did he, I wondered, say much the same things the second time round? The second day’s performance, my Brazilian friend told me, was identical to the first! In personal matters, too, he was a marvel - remembering the names of my children, who he had never met, with total ease, for example.

I’ll be returning to Drucker shortly, with a special blog on how to achieve his ideal of effectiveness. But I can’t resist one anecdote of my own. I took Peter to lunch with Arnold Weinstock, then still Britain’s most famed manager. The conversation was mainly historical, but when we were in the lift, Peter came right to the point. “When he leaves the company, sell the shares!” I remembered that when later, sans Weinstock, the once-great General Electric Company lost virtually all its value. As a prophet, too, Peter Drucker had no peer.