Peter Drucker: The Vienna Refugee Whose GM Study Alfred Sloan Ignored

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Peter Drucker was born in Vienna in 1909 into a liberal Protestant household that hosted intellectuals including Joseph Schumpeter and Friedrich Hayek. By the early 1930s he was a journalist and lecturer in Frankfurt, and when the Nazi regime purged Jewish professors from his university in 1933, he left Germany within 48 hours. In London he worked as a bank economist and attended John Maynard Keynes's seminars, realizing he cared about human behavior rather than commodities. He moved to the United States in the late 1930s, was fired from Sarah Lawrence College for refusing to sign a faculty manifesto against a colleague, and was hired by Bennington College.

In 1943 General Motors invited him to spend two years auditing the company, from board meetings to the assembly line. The resulting 1946 book, Concept of the Corporation, promoted decentralization and treated the corporation as a human community, which chairman Alfred Sloan resented. Drucker wrote The Practice of Management in 1954 after finding no such book in a General Electric library, coined the term knowledge worker in 1959, and later championed nonprofits like the American Red Cross and the Salvation Army. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2002 and died at 95.

• According to the episode, Sloan banned mention of Drucker's name in his presence.
• Drucker called management a liberal art and promoted outsourcing through his front room and back room distinction.
• His idea of planned abandonment pushed organizations to drop yesterday's successes in order to survive.
• The Wall Street Journal found loose facts in his late-1980s lectures, and he replied that he used anecdotes to make a point, not to write history.
• In Japan a bestselling novel, later an anime and a live-action film, follows a high school girl who manages a baseball team using Drucker's books.