The World according to Peter Drucker - Hardcover

Peter Drucker's influence is global: his twenty-nine books have sold over five million copies, and they have been translated into nearly every language in the world. His views on management industrial organization, business strategy, leadership development and employee motivation have tutored not just companies but countries -- Drucker served as a guru to the postwar Japanese economic miracle -- and he has an earned reputation for forecasting future social and economic trends. His concepts and coinages are the stuff of contemporary management thought; they include "privatization" "the knowledge worker" "management by objectives" "postmodern" and "discontinuity" as a principle to understand this era of vertiginous change. Drucker's ideas and books gain authority from his work as a management consultant; for fifty years he has immersed himself in the management challenges of Fortune 500 corporations, museums, charitable foundations, churches, hospitals, small businesses, universities, governments, and even baseball teams -- Yogi Berra was once a client. "The World According to Peter Drucker" is the first biography and concise intellectual portrait of one of the twentieth century's great minds -- "the greatest thinker management theory has produced" in the words of "The Economist." Written with Drucker's full cooperation, the book ranges over six decades of Drucker's work from his early antifascist writings to his very latest books. The reader learns the inside story of why Drucker's classic study of General Motors, "Concept of the Corporation, " was scorned by GM's storied chairman, Alfred P. Sloan; watches over Drucker's shoulder as he virtually invents management andmanagement theory; and notes the recurring paradox of Drucker's career: the "man who invented the corporate society" has been a sometimes sulphuric critic of capitalist excess. Indeed, Drucker, the author writes, should be seen as "a moralist of our business civilization."

Jack Beatty is a Senior Editor at The Atlantic Monthly, where he has edited several of Peter Drucker's articles, and the author of The Rascal King, a biography of the legendary Irish-American politician James Michael Curley that John Kenneth Gaibraith described as "truly brilliant."