Thinkers Timeline

Peter Ferdinand Drucker (1909-2005) was an Austrian-American writer and teacher whose books and articles over seven decades shaped the practice of management and helped establish it as a distinct field of study. He was born in Vienna in 1909 to an educated middle-class family — his father a senior civil servant, his mother one of the first women to study medicine in Austria. The Drucker home was a meeting place for intellectuals, and the young Peter grew up among people like the economist Joseph Schumpeter and the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. He studied law in Hamburg and Frankfurt, earned a doctorate in international law in 1931, and worked briefly as a financial journalist. The rise of Nazism drove him out of Germany in 1933; he moved first to London, then in 1937 to the United States, where he spent the rest of his life. His 1939 book The End of Economic Man analysed the rise of fascism. In 1943 General Motors invited him to spend two years studying the company, producing Concept of the Corporation in 1946, one of the first serious studies of how a large modern business actually works. Over the following decades he wrote thirty-nine books and hundreds of articles covering management, innovation, the non-profit sector, economics, and the rise of the knowledge worker. He taught at New York University and for most of his later career at the Claremont Graduate School in California, which named its management school after him. He advised corporations, governments, non-profits, and religious organisations. He died in Claremont in 2005 at the age of ninety-five.