Peter Drucker and Management

1Drucker the European

DOI: 10.4324/9781003410485-2

Introduction

Warren Bennis wrote that Drucker had much in common with another “foreign visitor” to America: Alexis de Tocqueville: “Drucker and Tocqueville have made more sweeping and readable generalizations about this country and its institutions than any of our native sons or daughters” (Bennis, 1985, p. 27). Like Tocqueville, Drucker was a bystander, an observer of American culture. His education and upbringing in the intellectual world of Austria before World War I, coupled with his experience seeing the rise of National Socialism in Germany and the failure of social institutions in that country, prepared him to be the architect of a social theory that placed management at the center. ...