Nofie Iman

Maybe this is too late. I’ve just heard that Peter Drucker, the deepest thinker the subject of management has seen, died earlier November 11, at 95. It is sad news. My exposure to Drucker has been at a distance, but he has had an influence, largely through his writings, both recently and his classics on management, entrepreneurship, and so on.

Drucker was a throwback, a polymath who ventured across intellectual disciplinary boundaries, someone fearless about turf wars and far more concerned about being useful. As he once said, he had “…a deep horror of obscurity and arrogance” so he tried to directly influence the people that mattered — managers and entrepreneurs — but not the tenure-granting coterie of academics at the business school of your choice. And he made a difference, while most of the rest of that biz academic rabble will deserved pass entirely unknown.

Financial Times wrote that Drucker hated being labelled as a “guru”. But that is what he was for thousands, probably millions, of managers. Never mind that the dictionary definitions of the word range from “venerable” and “weighty” to “mediator of divine truth.” To Drucker, guru was synonymous with “charlatan”. He preferred to be known, he often said, as “just an old journalist”.

As so often in his life, he was indulging not so much in false modesty as in good-humoured self-mockery. For he was manifestly very much more than that.

To his many admirers, in Asia almost as much as his native Europe (he was born in Vienna) and his adoptive United States, he was the grand old man of provocative theory and thoughtful practice. He could always be relied upon to provide a helping hand through the latest trends in politics, society, economics, and especially business.

For people whose only exposure to his work was a single article or speech, his constant use of the quick insight, the aphorism, the analogy and the metaphor sometimes created an impression of glibness. But Drucker saw this as an occupational hazard of communicating clearly about complex issues.

From his early writing days as a journalist in the 1930s to the very last years of his life, with several professorships and three dozen respected books behind him, he continued to believe that the best ideas have to be simplified, often to the limit, in order to be effective. When criticised in the 1980s for writing a cursory newspaper article about “the five rules of successful acquisitions”, he grinned ruefully and pronounced in typically gnomic Drucker-ese: “My best ideas have only one moving part.”

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