Basic ideas

Several ideas run through most of Drucker's writings:

• Decentralization and simplification. Drucker discounted the command and control model and asserted that companies work best when they are decentralized. According to Drucker, corporations tend to produce too many products, hire employees they don't need (when a better solution would be outsourcing), and expand into economic sectors that they should avoid.
• A profound skepticism of macroeconomic theory. Drucker contended that economists of all schools fail to explain significant aspects of modern economies.
• Respect of the worker. Drucker believed that employees are assets and not liabilities. He taught that knowledge workers are the essential ingredients of the modern economy.
• A belief in what he called "the sickness of government." Drucker made nonpartisan claims that government is often unable or unwilling to provide new services that people need or want, though he believed that this condition is not inherent to democracy.
• The need for "planned abandonment." Businesses and governments have a natural human tendency to cling to "yesterday's successes" rather than seeing when they are no longer useful.
• A belief that, taking action without thinking is the cause of every failure.
• The need for community. Early in his career, Drucker predicted the "end of economic man" and advocated the creation of a "plant community" where individuals' social needs could be met. He later acknowledged that the plant community never materialized, and by the 1980s, suggested that volunteering in the non-profit sector was the key to fostering a healthy society where people found a sense of belonging and civic pride.
• The need to manage business by balancing a variety of needs and goals, rather than subordinating an institution to a single value. This concept of management by objectives forms the keynote of his 1954 landmark "The Practice of Management".
• A company's primary responsibility is to serve its customers. Profit is not the primary goal, but rather an essential condition for the company's continued existence.
• Organisation should have a proper way of executing all its business processes

Quotes

• "In fact, that management has a need for advanced education - as well as for systematic manager development - means only that management today has become an institution of our society."^[26]
• "The best way to predict the future is to create it."
• "Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things."
• "What's measured improves."
• “Company cultures are like country cultures. Never try to change one. Try, instead, to work with what you've got.”
• “Efficiency is doing better what is already being done. “
• “Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action.”
• “People who don't take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year. People who do take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year.”
• “The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn't said.”
• “The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.”
• “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”
• “When a subject becomes totally obsolete we make it a required course.”
• "Rank does not confer privilege or give power. It imposes responsibility."

List of publications

• Friedrich Julius Stahl: konservative Staatslehre und geschichtliche Entwicklung (1932)
• The End of Economic Man: The Origins of Totalitarianism (1939) Google Booksearch Preview
• The Future of Industrial Man (1942)
• Concept of the Corporation (1945) (A study of General Motors)
• The New Society (1950)
• The Practice of Management (1954)
• America's Next 20 Years (1957)
• Landmarks of Tomorrow: A Report on the New 'Post-Modern' World (1959)
• Power and Democracy in America (1961)
• Managing for Results: Economic Tasks and Risk-Taking Decisions (1964)
• The Effective Executive (1966)
• The Age of Discontinuity (1968)
• Technology, Management and Society (1970)
• Men, Ideas and Politics (1971)
• Management: Tasks, Responsibilities and Practices (1973)
• The Unseen Revolution: How Pension Fund Socialism Came to America (1976)
• An Introductory View of Management (1977)
• Adventures of a Bystander (1979) (Autobiography)
• Song of the Brush: Japanese Painting from the Sanso Collection (1979)
• Managing in Turbulent Times (1980)
• Toward the Next Economics and Other Essays (1981)
• The Changing World of the Executive (1982)
• The Temptation to Do Good (1984)
• Innovation and Entrepreneurship: Practice and Principles (1985)
• The Discipline of Innovation, Harvard Business Review, 1985
• The Frontiers of Management (1986)
• The New Realities (1989)
• Managing the Non-Profit Organization: Practices and Principles (1990)
• Managing for the Future: The 1990s and Beyond (1992)
• The Post-Capitalist Society (1993)
• The Ecological Vision: Reflections on the American Condition (1993)
• The Theory of the Business, Harvard Business Review, September-October 1994
• Managing in a Time of Great Change (1995)
• Drucker on Asia: A Dialogue Between Peter Drucker and Isao Nakauchi (1997)
• Peter Drucker on the Profession of Management (1998)
• Management Challenges for the 21st century (1999)
• Managing Oneself, Harvard Business Review, March-April 1999
• The Essential Drucker: The Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker's Essential Writings on Management (2001)
• Leading in a Time of Change: What it Will Take to Lead Tomorrow (2001; with Peter Senge)
• The Effective Executive Revised (2002)
• They're Not Employees, They're People, Harvard Business Review, February 2002
• Managing in the Next Society (2002)
• A Functioning Society (2003)
• The Daily Drucker: 366 Days of Insight and Motivation for Getting the Right Things Done (2004)
• What Makes An Effective Executive, Harvard Business Review, June 2004.
• The Effective Executive in Action (2005)