Investors' Bookshelf: A Biography of Management's Mastermind

Peter Drucker: Shaping the Managerial Mind, by John E. Flaherty. Jossey-Bass Publishers, October 1999; 445 pages.

Most of us manage to change careers just once in a lifetime. Peter Drucker did far better than that.

At one time a political theorist, an economist, a management consultant, a journalist, a novelist and a Japanese art expert, it's a wonder that Drucker ever found the time to research and formulate the philosophical underpinnings of the modern business corporation. Luckily for us, he did.

In fact, Drucker's insights into management practices are part of a legacy of scholarship that has served as a fertile source of inspiration for business leaders for six decades, and has marked him as one of the most influential figures in 20th-century thought.

Now a new book by John E. Flaherty, professor emeritus of management at New York's Pace University and Drucker's friend and follower, pays homage to the work of the Austrian-born American, who celebrated his 90th birthday last year.

In Peter Drucker: Shaping the Managerial Mind, Flaherty describes Drucker's most important works, the thinking behind them and how they have affected the modern business world.

Drucker's views on politics, economics and business are studied through a discussion of his early works, and the development of his management philosophy is tracked by bringing the reader through Drucker's youth, its influence on his later thinking, and on to his later theories on management. The book embraces all of Drucker's work to date and includes a bibliography of all his major writings.

Drucker's approach to management is unique, sometimes incorporating philosophy and religion. He argues that companies must fill their corporate culture with the spirit of transformation, so that change is welcomed instead of considered a threat. And when he began his studies in 1939, he put forward the then radical idea that corporate management is a discipline worthy of academic study.

Indeed, some of his most influential works were written early in his career, including The End of Economic Man (1939) and The Future of Industrial Man (1942), both of which discuss the nature of industrial society, and Concept of the Corporation (1946), which explains Drucker's general ideas about modern business management.

Many of Drucker's opinions on management were formulated in Concept of the Corporation, the result of a study of the inner workings of General Motors(GM Quote).

Drucker was impressed with General Motors' management team, at the time under the leadership of Alfred Sloan. But he found the company unwilling to adapt to the modern world by empowering its workers with a sense of corporate loyalty and by adopting greater social responsibility toward the outside world. General Motors rejected Drucker's book, but it soon became required reading for new executives at the Ford Motor Company(F Quote).

As for Drucker himself, Flaherty presents his friend and mentor as a brilliant man who, with multifaceted interests and boundless enthusiasm, was temperamentally unsuited to a single career path, perhaps happily for us. "He has defied professional labels," writes Flaherty. He points out that Drucker studied management not because he was interested in business, but because he was interested in "society, community and organization."

Indeed, Drucker's path to management guru included a doctoral degree in law, work as a journalist in Germany and the U.K. and, in 1937, in the U.S. as a correspondent for several British newspapers. After becoming an American citizen, Drucker served as a professor of management at New York University from 1950 to 1972.

But Drucker's work was often rejected by academics that balked at his refusal to furnish his studies with footnotes. And Flaherty notes that Drucker is still dismissed as a journalist by a small segment within the management discipline, instead of being considered a professional scholar; an "unpardonable" belief, according to Flaherty.

A number of studies of Drucker's work already exist, so it's worth asking what Flaherty brings to the table. For one thing, the fact that a disciple and friend to Drucker wrote this book means that it does offer a number of rare insights into the development of the ideas that shaped the structure of modern corporate management.

But although Flaherty's study is comprehensive, it sometimes reads like a stodgy academic study of Drucker's philosophy. For a basic introduction to Drucker's ideas, better seek out one of the many works on the great man already in print.