Drucker’s big picture fills small screen
When ServiceMaster Co. hired Peter F. Drucker as a consultant years ago, he went to a board meeting and asked the directors a simple question: What business are you in? One director replied, “Lawn care, home security....” Another chimed in, “And pest control and house cleaning....”
“Wrong,” Drucker said. “You’re in the business of training and deploying people.”
Whether looking at a single company or a society in flux, Drucker has long been known for his ability to see the big picture more clearly than most. Drucker, the author of 35 books and hundreds of articles on business management, is the subject this time as CNBC presents “Peter Drucker: An Intellectual Journey” at 4 p.m. and 7 p.m. today.
Writer-director Ken Witty’s one-hour documentary is a smart, if occasionally fawning, portrait of the 93-year-old writer, teacher and consultant.
The show traces Drucker’s early years in 1920s Vienna, his opposition to the Nazis as a young journalist in Europe, his economic studies with John Maynard Keynes while working as an investment banker in 1930s London and highlights of his writings in the U.S. after he immigrated in 1937.
Before Drucker wrote “The End of Economic Man” in 1939, there had been little scholarly work on business management. Drucker, who saw business as an organized activity and not just a process of buying low and selling high, followed with influential works such as “Concept of the Corporation” in 1945, his inside look at General Motors.
Drucker’s work goes beyond business management, however. Considered a pioneer in the field of demography, Drucker saw the dawning of the “knowledge society” in his 1969 book, “The Age of Discontinuity.”
If a biography of the father of modern management seems like odd Christmas Eve programming, consider that CNBC filled one slow news day a few years ago with highlights from the Los Angeles Times’ investment conference.
Scrooges might call Drucker an appropriate choice anyway for the ultimate capitalist holiday, but he captures the Christmas spirit in another sense, too: as a guiding light for the nonprofit groups he has worked with over the years.