Peter Drucker is 100

Peter Ferdinand Drucker is 100 today. If there is one person who has impacted the thought and direction in the field of management in the most profound manner, it is Drucker.

I admire his thoughts and his writings for the variety of subjects he covered, for the simple underlying principles for all that he said, and for the vision and foresight.

Some of the basic ideas that he propounded were indeed basic. But those basic ideas had been lost in the myriad and complicated world of management literature. In such a scenario, he chose to remain simple in his explanation.

The belief that thought before action is very important, decentralisation and rejection of command and control structure, focus on employees as assets, who needed to be cared for, 'planned abandonment' of existing and past successes, importance of processes for everything, the concept of the knowledge worker, and the need for community were the highlights.

I liked him because he was a skeptic of macroeconomic theory. Since the advent of banker economists, decisions are being driven by macroeconomic masala with absolutely no awareness or understanding of the real economy. Drucker warned against this. And look where we are today.

He also believed that CEO pay should not be more than 20 times worker pay. This has been flouted many times over, and we've ended up in this state of the mass up against the establishment.

Look at the wide spectrum that he has touched upon, and you will realise that most others who have claimed to have said something path-breaking are but reflections of this great man.

I remember him and his view in a class of cost accounting in which my professor explained why relevant costing was so good, spending great amounts of time to convince us why we should look at relevant costs, only to conclude by quoting Drucker who said that you should cover total costs if you have to be in business in the long term.

There is only one guru, and that is, without doubt, Peter Drucker. He hated being referred to as a 'guru', and said that the term was being used as it was shorter than 'charlatan'. I don't agree with this. I'm not sure if he was only being modest, but in the Indian sense of the word 'guru', a teacher, he absolutely fits the bill.

It would be an achievement if I could test the waters, touch the shores of the ocean that Drucker is. I'll read what I consider to be one of his best works 'Management Challenges for the 21st Century', today. It could very well be called 'Management Challenges for any Century'.