Management Challenges for the 21st Century

This book compiles several of Drucker's recent articles and interviews. Like all of his work and ideas, it is well worth your time and attention. Drucker is one author who always looks into the future with a realistic perspective, armed with lots of background information, and decades of experience with the business world.

Peter F. Drucker is a storied business management consultant (most famously as a consultant for General Motors) that taught business administration and sociology at Claremont University in California. He died at the age of 95 in 2005.

Drucker’s management insight reverses the power structure of profit and non-profit enterprises; i.e. management down changes to management up with organization leaders determining direction but employees (knowledge workers) controlling productivity and effectiveness.

Education is a critical component of Drucker’s philosophy of management. Drucker’s approach contradicts the present direction of educational reform that focuses on teacher accountability for educating students in the fundamentals of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Drucker promotes a Montessori like approach to education. Drucker believes in structuring education based on student interest rather than set curriculum. He lauds the growth of community colleges that focus on what students want to learn rather than what others think they should learn.

Peter Drucker has been an insightful sociologist and guru of American free enterprise in the twentieth century. Managers that choose to follow Drucker’s recommendations may improve their success by following his advice in the 21st century. If Drucker is correct, not only will productivity improve, Monday morning arrival at work will be interesting and fulfilling; rather than punishing.