About PETER F. DRUCKER

Early Years
Born in Vienna on November 19, 1909. His kindergarten teacher taught “the concept of management”, the school he attended in 4th grade focused on what people can do and his religious instructor asked,
“What do you want to be remembered for?”

PETER F. DRUCKER PASSES AWAY AT AGE 95

Peter F. Drucker, the world’s foremost pioneer of management theory, died this morning. He was 95.

Drucker was the Marie Rankin Clarke Professor of Social Sciences and Management at Claremont Graduate University (CGU) from 1971 to 2003 where he continued to write and consult up to the time of his death.

Drucker’s career as a writer, consultant and teacher spanned nearly 75 years. His groundbreaking work turned modern management theory into a serious discipline. He influenced or created nearly every facet of its application, including decentralization, privatization, empowerment, and understanding of “the knowledge worker.”

“What distinguishes Peter Drucker from many other thought leaders in my mind is that he cared not just about how business manages its resources, but also how public and private organizations operate morally and ethically within society,” said Cornelis de Kluyver, dean of the Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management at Claremont Graduate University. “He respected the values of education, personal responsibility, and business’ accountability to society. His true legacy is his insistence on this value system, and its effect on business, society, and individual lives.”

Born November 19, 1909, in Vienna, Drucker was educated in Austria and England and earned a doctorate from Frankfurt University in 1931. He became a financial reporter for Frankfurter General Anzeiger in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1929, which allowed him to immerse himself in the study of international law, history and finance.

Drucker moved to London in 1933 to escape Hitler’s Germany and took a job as a securities analyst for an insurance firm. Four years later he married Doris Schmitz and the couple departed for the United States.

In 1939, Drucker landed a part-time teaching position at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. He joined the faculty of Bennington College in Vermont in 1942 and the next year put his academic career on hold to spend two years studying the management structure of General Motors. This experience led to his book “Concept of the Corporation,” an immediate bestseller in the United States and Japan, which validated the notion that great companies could stand among humankind’s noblest inventions.