Peter Drucker, 1909-2005

The death of “management guru” (and, oh, how he hated that term) Peter Drucker (left) dominated obituary sections this weekend; see, for example, NYT and WaPo writeups and the reprint of a WSJ interview from 2000 and a conversation with Forbes last year. ZDNet’s Phil Wainewright points to a favorite Drucker moment, where he tells off Wired by reminding them “the computer industry, as an industry, hasn’t made a dime.”

Enough time has passed now that the more personal testimonials have begun to appear:

• In Fortune, Geoffrey Colvin observes that “Drucker’s career was so productive for so long… that he pretty well ran the table on management topics.”
  
• On his blog, Tom Peters recalls, “Mr. Drucker would have been appalled to be described as a ‘popularizer’—after all, that was one of his abiding and biting criticisms of me. But the truth is that, though his consulting was carried out in the stratospheric confines of CEO-world, his books and articles were very comprehensible and accessible to the likes of LTJG Thomas J Peters, USN, in 1968, when Peters, age 25, left Vietnam and was assigned to a forces management team in the Pentagon.”
  

No word yet on how this will affect the plans at Collins to republish Drucker’s 1966 classic, The Effective Executive, along with a new workbook called The Executive Executive in Action, in January 2006. Two more titles, Innnovation and Entrepeneurship and Managing the Nonprofit Organization, were scheduled to follow in May.

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