11/12/2005

A Guru Passes On

I was saddened to read about Peter Drucker's death. He was one of the individuals who made a difference and never stopped learning until his death. As the CNN dispatch said, he was a "visionary". May his soul rest in peace.

Management guru Drucker dead
Visionary and pioneer who promoted the study of management dead at 95.
November 12, 2005: 5:27 PM EST

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Peter Drucker, one of the world's foremost management theorists, died on Friday morning of natural causes at his home in Claremont, California, a Claremont Graduate University spokesman said. He was 95.

An Austrian-born journalist and intellectual, Drucker is considered the inventor of management as a field of study.

His career spanned nearly 75 years, during which time he authored 39 books, from 1939's "The End of the Economic Man" to his last book, "The Effective Executive in Action." That volume, co-authored with Joseph Maciariello, will be published in early 2006.

Management, he once said, "deals with people, their values, their growth and development, social structure, the community and even with spiritual concerns."

A central component of his philosophy was the view that people were an organization's most valuable resource, a revolutionary idea when he first began proposing it in the 1950s. He foresaw the onset of what he called the "age of the knowledge worker," according to the university.

He also demonstrated a keen eye for observing management and business trends, in the 1950s predicting the coming importance of computers, in the 1960s predicting the competitive advantage of the Far East, and in the 1990s predicting a backlash against high executive paychecks.

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