University of Minnesota - UMN Executive Leadership Insights
The World According to Peter Drucker
Book

The World According to Peter Drucker

Peter Ferdinand Drucker and Jack Beatty
Free Press, 1998
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Editorial Rating

6

Qualities

  • Well Structured
  • Concrete Examples
  • For Beginners

Recommendation

Peter Drucker’s philosophies and theories have shaped management all over the world. Drucker is highly respected. He has always taught that people are an organization’s most important resource. In 1954, Drucker virtually invented ’management.’ Although, of course, management existed before, nobody had ever treated it as a distinct field. Jack Beatty’s book about Peter Drucker is not just another biography. Beatty criticizes Drucker in some areas and extols his virtues in others. The book is sometimes entertaining and consistently well written. Enough of Drucker’s ideas are included to make you want to read his books. Most of the book summarizes Drucker’s work chronologically. Company leaders who want their top people to learn about management should make this required reading. getAbstract.com recommends this book to managers in all industries.

Summary

Peter Ferdinand Drucker was born 1915 in Vienna, Austria. World War I strongly influenced his thinking. 

Peter Drucker’s father worked for the Ministry of Economics of the Austro-Hungarian government. Drucker’s earliest memory at the beginning of World War I in August, 1914, is of his father or, perhaps, one of his father’s friends saying, “This is the end not just of Austria, but of civilization.”  

The war influenced every aspect of Drucker’s life and impelled him to become a writer. Drucker began listening to his father’s dinner party guests who included economists, lawyers and future heads of state. At a young age, Drucker also met American journalist Dorothy Thompson and author Thomas Mann. Most of his early schooling was done at home. He was surrounded by some of the most famous minds of his day.

Drucker learned Japanese art, studied the history of work and had a job as a clerk-trainee for an export firm. In his first real job, he wrote about finance for Frankfurt’s largest newspaper. He received a Ph.D. from Frankfurt University. He wrote his first book while Hitler was rising to power. When Hitler’s henchmen dismissed all Jewish faculty...

About the Authors

Jack Beatty is a senior editor at The Atlantic Monthly, where he edited several of Peter Drucker’s articles. He wrote The Rascal King, a biography of the legendary Irish-American politician James Michael Curley.

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