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Peter Drucker’s Legacy: It’s All About the People

Peter Drucker was the most influential management thinker of the past century. But his most crucial insights were about workers.

Mr. Drucker, who died Friday at age 95, was among the first to see the limits of large industrial organizations and their authoritarian hierarchies. Long before the Internet, before even the first computer chips, he foresaw the arrival of "knowledge workers" motivated by personal pride as much as by fear and a paycheck. Harnessing their talents, he argued, required a new approach to management.

He dispensed this advice in simple prose in 39 books over a remarkable 60-year career, and in probing conversations with scores of executives. Along the way, he developed a loyal following among many of the world’s most-famous corporate chieftains, and became the model of the modern management guru, a craft he plied far more modestly than many of his successors.

While Mr. Drucker’s eclectic interests ran from European history to Japanese art, his management teachings centered on ways to make workers more effective.

David A. Jones, co-founder and retired chairman and chief executive of Humana Inc., a Louisville, Ky., health insurer, recalls the core of Mr. Drucker’s advice this way: "Successful enterprises create the conditions to allow their employees to do their best work."

By Scott Thurm

From The Wall Street Journal Online

Full Story: http://www.careerjournal.com/myc/management/20051115-thurm.html?cjcontent=mail

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