In 1974, the New York Times reported that sales of Peter Drucker’s latest book, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, had overtaken those of Alex Comfort’s illustrated primer The Joy of Sex. For one brief moment, management was the hottest topic of all.
Only Drucker could have achieved this. “No other person has had the impact on the practice of management that he did,” according to one of today’s leading authorities, CK Prahalad. This November marks the centenary of Drucker’s birth – he died in 2005 just short of his 96th birthday – and the anniversary has been celebrated in a series of events round the world.
Last week in Vienna, the city where Drucker was born and spent the first 18 years of his life, an international conference debated his significance and continued relevance. But the idea was to look forwards and not back, as Richard Straub, the conference organiser, explained. “We are not opening a museum here,” he said. “We have plenty in this city already.”
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