Drucker Managed To Do It First And Now He Is Gone

In the Financial Times

My favorite and most influential management guru -- Peter Drucker -- passes on at age 95.

"Managers learn in business school that relationships are either up or down, but the most important relationships today are sideways," Drucker said with an Austrian accent grown stronger with old age. "If there is one thing that most of the people I know in management have to learn it is how to handle relationships where there is no authority and no orders. Now, what else do you have?" ~ Peter Drucker, November 15, 2004.

Doesn't it sound like entrepreneurship? Well entrepreneurship and innovation occupied him powerfully in his later years, along with the growth of what he called “knowledge work” and management's wider role in society. He revelled in such observations as “for the first four years, no new enterprise produces profits. Even Mozart didn't start writing music until he was four."

Drucker taught us that the best ideas have to be simplified in order to be effective. Who else could question with such authority: “What business are we in, and who are our customers?”

I will miss his genius immensely. Read the obituary here.