The mark of a truly revolutionary thinker is that his revolution has to be fought anew in every generation.
That's the case with Peter F. Drucker, whose teachings on business management retain their startling wisdom four years after his death at the age of 95 and seven decades after the publication of his first book -- the first of 39.
This year was the centenary of Peter Drucker's birth. It wouldn't be right to let the year expire without reviewing how his ideas apply to business today.
As is true with every revolutionary thinker, Drucker's most enduring ideas contradict conventional wisdom. That's why business leaders need to relearn his lessons every few years, and that's why his insights seem perennially fresh.
Forbes put its finger on the phenomenon with its headline on a 1997 cover story about Drucker: "Still the youngest mind." Drucker was then 87.
Born in Vienna on Nov. 19, 1909, Drucker joined a London investment firm upon Hitler's rise to power, then immigrated to the United States in 1937. After teaching politics and philosophy at Bennington College, he moved to the graduate business school of New York University, where he stayed 20 years, and subsequently to Claremont Graduate University, where he held a professorship from 1971 nearly until his death.
Drucker's most important insight concerned the role of the corporation in society. "The business enterprise is a creature of a society and an economy, and society or economy can put any business out of existence overnight," he wrote in 1974. "The enterprise exists on sufferance and exists only as long as the society and the economy believe that it does a necessary, useful, and productive job."
From that simple observation sprung a wealth of further insights. It placed the corporation's social responsibility in perspective by establishing its breadth and its limitations.
Drucker showed that there is no "inherent contradiction between profit and a company's need to make a social contribution," but that the former is indispensable to achieve the latter. He also warned that an enterprise that fails to "think through its impacts and its responsibilities" exposes itself to justified attack from social forces. Consumerism and environmentalism, he taught, are not enemies to be vanquished, but symptoms of business' failure to understand its broad social role.
