‘Why read Peter Drucker?’ by Alan Kantrow and ‘Drucker Today’ by Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Harvard Business Review, November 2009

HBR includes two articles on Drucker in its November issue to mark the 100th anniversary of his birth and this certainly provides a good opportunity to revisit the work of perhaps the most influential - and certainly the most prolific and long lasting - management thinker of our time. His influence is perhaps in need of revival because in the Times list mentioned above, he was at the top in 2001 but is no longer in the top 20. Of course one factor has been his death in the intervening period; no influence can last for ever.


Of the two articles, Moss Kanter’s is far more insightful and down to earth, as you would expect from someone of her reputation. She demonstrates Drucker’s wisdom by pointing out that much of what he said is relevant to the current economic crisis and, if it had been heeded, would have reduced the impact. In the 1980s he warned of the public backlash from excessive executive pay and also predicted the troubles ahead for General Motors, unless they became more innovative. Moss Kanter attributes this foresight to Drucker’s unique ability to spot broader trends and see beyond the need for short-term profit.

The Kantrow article is in fact just a reprint of one produced in the 1980s and suffers from over complication and theoretical wording. What Ross Kanter calls spotting broad trends, Kantrow calls ‘integrative thinking’ and the author rather pretentiously expresses the view that it was the way Drucker thought rather than the content of his output that was significant, not an easy or relevant separation to my simple mind.

It is however this article that provides the greatest insight into Drucker’s power and popularity. It is in the impact he had on high calibre senior people with concise but powerful statements of - what should be - blindingly obvious. Most impressive is how A.G. Lafley, CEO of Procter and Gamble, states that his leadership of P&G’s superb recovery was driven by Drucker’s simple statement - ‘There is only one valid definition of business purpose; to create a customer’.

Both articles mention Drucker’s wide influence on thinking in the developing world and it is interesting that Zhang Rumin, a CEO of one of China’s biggest companies, also attributes some of his success to the same Drucker quote which he ‘took to heart’ when developing the company’s strategy in the face of competitive challenges and a changing environment. Rumin has another Drucker quote on his wall - ‘Companies fail because the assumptions on which their organisations are being run no longer fit reality’.

Surely these two CEOs and their use of his quotations are a better and more convincing explanation of Drucker’s long-term appeal; he talked common sense and was able to produce memorable bite sized statements that have stayed in the mind of those who really influence events. A few simple sound bites can be worth far more than long articles in learned journals.

To read this article go to

http://hbr.harvardbusiness.org/2009/11/peter-drucker-today/ar/1