STREET DOGS

Aman should never be appointed to a managerial position if his vision focuses on people’s weaknesses rather than on their strengths. The man who always knows exactly what people cannot do, but never sees anything that they can do, will undermine the spirit of his organisation. — Peter F Drucker

Peter Drucker died in November 2005, eight days short of his 96th birthday. The guru’s guru, a sage ... he invented management. What John Maynard Keynes is to economics, Drucker is to management.

“The world knows he was the greatest management thinker of the last century,” said Jack Welch, former chair of General Electric, after Drucker’s death.

“He was the creator and inventor of modern management,” said management guru Tom Peters. “In the early 1950s, nobody had a tool kit to manage these incredibly complex organisations that had gone out of control. Drucker was the first person to give us a handbook for that.”

But by the time he died Drucker had grown so disenchanted with business that he would work only within the nonprofit sector. He had come to see the corporation as a place where self-interest had triumphed over the egalitarian principles he long championed.

He became one of corporate America’s most important critics. When conglomerates were the rage, he preached against reckless M&A. When executives were engaged in empire building, he argued against excess staff. During the hostile takeovers of the 1980s, he likened Wall Street traders to “Balkan peasants stealing each other’s sheep”.

What particularly enraged him was the tendency of corporate managers to reap massive earnings while firing thousands of workers. “This is morally and socially unforgivable,” he wrote, “and we will pay a heavy price for it.” /Michel Pireu (pireum@streetdogs.co.za)