What will your most important contribution be? What do you want to be remembered for? This chapter is about these two very central questions—questions that only you can answer. What makes them valuable is that they direct you to see yourself as the person you can become. For Peter Drucker (1909–2005) the question, “What do you want to be remembered for?” was the question that brings self-renewal into people’s lives.
Drucker constantly asked himself both questions throughout his life. But this chapter, instead of expounding on them at length, provides a few background details about the man who was the greatest management thinker of our time and concludes by presenting an example of what he said that speaks volumes about him.
Many people consider Peter Drucker to be the inventor of management. Indeed, words to that effect have been printed in the most distinguished media, including The Economist, Forbes, BusinessWeek, and The Wall Street Journal. Yet Drucker himself never accepted that description, even if he less vehemently contested it toward the end of his life. Correspondingly, he once remarked on this subject that if someone had to be named the inventor of management, the individual selected should be the CEO of Pyramids Inc., the manager who in 2600 BC oversaw the construction of the Pyramid of Cheops. To be precise, no one individual invented management; it is a joint achievement of humankind. Drucker was the first person to put management into words. And in that endeavor he succeeded like nobody else.
With characteristic modesty, Drucker only described himself as a “writer,” a remarkable self-image coming from a man who may rightfully be called the greatest management thinker of all time. He authored over 30 major works, and wrote countless articles for the most prestigious publications, including The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, and The Economist. In 2002, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush.
Drucker’s achievements cannot be valued too highly. Before he wrote his books, hardly any works on management were available. His first two books, The End of Economic Man, (1939) and The Future of Industrial Man (1942), which combined political and social analysis with the question of what constituted a healthy, functioning society, were followed in 1946 by Concept of the Corporation, which gained widespread recognition primarily because it established management for the very first time as an independent discipline and research domain.
Drucker’s life work spanned around 65 years and covered every facet of the complex field of management: the individual, the organization, and society. An overall understanding of management can be achieved only if all three factors are brought together and taken into account. At the same time, a healthy, functioning society can be understood only if management’s function, importance, and mode of action are likewise appreciated.
Over the decades, Drucker himself was repeatedly asked which of his books was the best (a question to which he always gave a startling answer, as you will see in Chapter 46 on Giuseppe Verdi). However, toward the end of his life he did finally reveal which six books, out of all those he had written, he deemed most important. Most of his choices are incontestable, but those familiar with his work may well be surprised by one or two of them, not to mention astonished by the absence of some works that they would have expected to see included on the list. The books Drucker selected were as follows1:
Concept of the Corporation (1946)
The Practice of Management (1954)
Managing for Results (1964)
The Effective Executive (1966)
The Age of Discontinuity (1969)
Innovation and Entrepreneurship (1985)
If you wish to acquire a profound and serious understanding of management, you cannot bypass Drucker. And you should not only read his works, you should also study them in detail, understand them, and—most important of all—apply them. There simply is no more worthwhile reading.
If you are looking for an introduction to Drucker’s ideas, try reading his Management, Revised Edition, a book that came about when his long-standing colleague, Joseph A. Maciariello, performed the invaluable task of revising and updating Drucker’s standard 1973 work titled Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices.
If you want to find out more about Peter Drucker as a human being and gain an insight into some of his personal thoughts, read the wonderful book by Jeffrey Krames, Inside Drucker’s Brain.2 This work not only clearly brings out Drucker’s genius and wisdom, but above all highlights his humanity. Another splendid book about him is The World According to Peter Drucker by Jack Beatty.3
Finally, here is an outstanding example from Peter Drucker himself, summing up his own most important contribution. Drucker viewed the question, “What do you want to be remembered for?” as crucial for bringing self-renewal into people’s lives, and the potentially enormous impact of the answer to that question is self-evident. This much is clear from the fact that Drucker’s works, published between 1939 and 2006, are still immensely influential today4:
What do I consider to be my most important contribution?
“That I early on—almost 60 years ago—realized that management has become the constitutive organ and function of the Society of Organizations;
“That management is not ‘Business Management’—though it first attained attention in business—but the governing organ of all institutions of Modern Society;
“That I established the study of management as a discipline in its own right; and
“That I focused this discipline on People and Power, on Values, Structure, and Constitution; and above all, on responsibilities—that is, focused the Discipline of Management on management as a truly liberal art.”
—PETER F. DRUCKER
JANUARY 18, 1999
What will your most important contribution be?
What do you want to be remembered for?