Peter Drucker's Legacy Includes Simple Advice: It's All About the People

By Ernie A. Cevallos

This classic eulogy to one of the greatest business thinkers was published By Scott Thurm and Joann S. Lublin, staff reporters of The Wall Street Journal on November 2005.



Peter Drucker was the most influential management thinker of the past century. But his most crucial insights were about workers.

Mr. Drucker, who died at age 95, was among the first to see the limits of large industrial organizations and their authoritarian hierarchies. Long before the Internet, before even the first computer chips, he foresaw the arrival of "knowledge workers" motivated by personal pride as much as by fear and a paycheck. Harnessing their talents, he argued, required a new approach to management.

Peter Drucker's Legacy Includes Simple Advice: It's All About the People

By Ernie A. Cevallos

Peter Drucker understood the value of people in the business equation a long time ago. In his last best seller book author Jim Collins deliberates on what could merely good companies do to become great. One of the no brainer findings had to do with the importance of people. Surprise, surprise?

It is evident that one of the primary objectives in making a company great is to get the right people for the task(s), and create a culture with self-disciplined team players who are willing to go to extreme lengths to fulfill their responsibilities. This truth about business is not revolutionary or new, besides Drucker and now Collins, the late W. Edwards Deming had also been preaching it with passion a long time ago. Why don’t we have more great companies with sustained growth and innovation? Well, that is the job of those of us in leadership roles; that is a fundamental that has to be right. At the end of the day huge value is created by getting the people truth right!

The Five Deadly Business Sins

Books on management are published by the hundreds each year, but for your money you can skip a great deal of these publications and simply re-read Peter F. Drucker, who will always be the Shakespere of the genre. The past few years have seen the downfall of one once-dominant business after another: General Motors, Sears and IBM, to name just a few. In every case the main cause has been at least one of the five deadly business sins, which undoubtedly will harm the mightiest business. Take a look and see how your business is doing?