Probably, the most prolific writer ever on entrepreneur – Peter Drucker – died yesterday, at 130000 google citings to entrepreneur. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%2Bdrucker+%2Bentrepreneur&btnG=Google+Search
So what did they say? Here are a few starters. Why not mail me at wcbn007@easynet.co.uk if you have a Drucker-inspiring view to add and I will aim to update this document.
ABOUT THE MAN
As Dean Kees de Kluyver of the Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management observes, “What distinguishes Peter Drucker from many other thought leaders in my mind is that he cared not just about how business manages its resources, but also how public and private organizations operate morally and ethically within society. He respected the values of education, personal responsibility, and business’ accountability to society. His true legacy is his insistence on this value system, and its effect on business, society, and individual lives.”
Drucker’s philosophy that management is a liberal art—one that takes into account not only economics, but also history, social theory, law, and the sciences. As Drucker said, “it deals with people, their values, their growth and development, social structure, the community and even with spiritual concerns
Maciariello, 2005: A systematic study of the writings of Peter Drucker will convince you that this man has had and continues to have an extraordinary impact on the functioning of the institutions of the United States and of the developed world. More important, such a study will enable you to improve the functioning of your organization, whether it is a business, a nonprofit social institution, or a government entity.
Finally, if you read his 65 years of work, you will see a man devoted to liberty, to institutions that function, to management, to individual achievement, to individual social status and function, to community, and to values that we in free societies widely share. And Drucker’s contributions to the functioning of the institutions of society have certainly enhanced freedom.
ABOUT ENTREPRENEUR
Peter D: “Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship. The act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth.”
New York Times 1998 review: ”The emergence of a truly entrepreneurial economy in the United States during the last 10 or 15 years,” he writes, is ”the most significant event to have occurred in recent economic and social history.” In a way it is surprising that it took him so long, for in exalting the entrepreneur Drucker is finally preaching what he practices. This is, after all, a man who once said: ”I couldn’t work in a large organization. They bore me to tears.” One way of viewing Peter Drucker’s career is as a spiritual exercise performed for the spiritually impoverished. ”Faith is not what today is so often called a ‘mystical experience,’ ” Drucker wrote in his 1949 essay on Kierkegaard, ”something that can apparently be induced by the proper breathing exercises or by prolonged exposure to Bach (not to mention drugs). It can be attained only through despair, through suffering, through painful and ceaseless struggle.” In Drucker’s attempt to bring a kind of faith to business there is a lingering mystery. How did a man with deep skepticism of capitalism, which he gave voice to over the decades, become the sage of the capitalist class? Could it be that somewhere deep in their hearts the men he advised shared his doubts?
Ratings quoted by Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship http://www.schwabfound.org/docs/web/Martin%202004%20CASIN%2017062004%20final.pdf Peace and security: 3/10 • Poverty: 4/10 • Hunger: 3/10 • Education: 3/10 • Health: 4/10 • Environment: 3/10 • Human rights: 3/10
Peter D, in chapter 1 of Innovation & Entrepreneurship:
Systematic Entrepreneurship
“The entrepreneur,” said the French economist J. B. Say around 1800, “shifts economic resources out of an area of lower and into an area of higher productivity and greater yield.” But Say’s definition does not tell us who this “entrepreneur” is. And since Say coined the term almost two hundred years ago, there has been total confusion over the definitions of “entrepreneur” and “entrepreneurship.”&ldots; No better text for a History of Entrepreneurship could be found than the creation and development of the modern university, and especially the modern American university. The modern university as we know it started out as the invention of a German diplomat and civil servant, Wilhelm von Humboldt, who in 1809 conceived and founded the University of Berlin with two clear objectives: to take intellectual and scientific leadership away from the French and give it to the Germans; and to capture the energies released by the French Revolution and turn them against the French themselves, especially Napoleon. Sixty years later, around 1870, when the German university itself had peaked, Humboldt’s idea of the university as a change agent was picked up across the Atlantic, in the United States. There, by the end of the Civil War, the old “colleges” of the colonial period were dying of senility. In 1870, the United States had no more than half the college students it had had in 1830, even though the population had nearly tripled, But in the next thirty years a galaxy of American university presidents* created and built a new “American university”-both distinctly new..
ABOUT THE FUTURE, WE ALUMNI OF THIS WEB CAN CHOOSE TO LEAD
Peter D –New Priorities – in 1992: Every 200 or 300 years, there is a very short period when the world suddenly changes – the way it does in a kaleidoscope. This is one of those periods when the old solutions no longer work. One can clearly see new priorities&ldots;.
Knowledge has become the central resource. [But] the productivity of knowledge workers is incredibly low. Does anybody here believe that the teacher of 1991 is more productive than the teacher of 1900? The productivity of service workers is even lower…. Over three-fourths of our workforce are service and knowledge workers. By the end of the century, 90 per cent of total workers will be knowledge and service workers. Productivity of knowledge work and dignity of service work are the two great priorities.
Peter D 1996: By and large, there are no more advantages to big business. There are only disadvantages. Big companies had three advantages, and they are all gone. The first was they could get transnational or international money that a medium-sized company could not. Now everyone can. Number Two is information. It used to be that nobody had any information. But as you go more international, as the economy becomes more global, the access to good information becomes crucial. If you are a medium-sized company, then the CEO still knows every customer and still knows the industry. You can’t know that in the US$10 billion company; you get reports. Reports tell you what your subordinates want you to know. The last and most important factor is that young, educated people do not want to work in the big institutions. That’s true even in Japan today.”
Chris Macrae is son of another thoughtleader on economics, future revolution, global and local networking, entrepreneur. Norman surveyed The Entrepreneurial Revolution in The Economist 1976, and enjoyed many learning conversations with Peter Drucker http://entrepreneurialrevolution.blogspot.com http://therebeleconomist.blogspot.com At this time of globalization singularity, management education enters its most critical stage. Will organisational leaders live up to sustaining a future that Drucker would trust?
