What Would Peter Do?
December 15, 2014
Early in his tenure as CEO of GE, Jack Welch met with the management expert Peter Drucker. They reviewed GE’s different business lines, and Drucker reportedly asked Welch about them, saying, “If you weren’t already in this business, would you enter it today? And if not, what are you going to do about it?” The meeting became the basis of Welch’s strategy for GE’s different businesses to be sold off if they couldn’t be first or second in their respective industries. Welch later labeled Drucker, “the greatest management thinker of the last half century.”
Welch was only one of many highly successful CEOs who bowed at the altar of Drucker. Asked which management thinkers had the biggest influence on him, Microsoft’s Bill Gates once replied, “Drucker, of course.” Intel’s Andrew Grove said Mr. Drucker was “a hero of mine.” And Rick Warren, founder of a mega-church in California and author of the mega-best-seller, “The Purpose Driven Life,” said a large part of his success stemmed from what he learned from Drucker.
Drucker, who was born in Austria in 1909 but moved to the United States in 1937, died in 2005. His pioneering ideas related to business, nonprofits, religion, and many other subjects continue to attract a loyal following in companies, classrooms, and many other venues throughout the world. While there’s no shortage of Drucker material to read—he wrote 39 books and many more articles—a new book, “A Year with Peter Drucker,” brings together excerpts of Drucker’s writings from throughout his long career (his first book was published in 1939), supplemented with insights from one of his long-time collaborators (and colleagues) at Claremont Graduate University.
One of us has just written a review of the book for The Wall Street Journal, and the review can be accessed here.
Articles © 2014 Matthew Slaughter and Matthew Rees. All rights reserved.
Publication © 2014 Trustees of Dartmouth College. All rights reserved.