Classic Advice for Today's Management Challenges

Peter F. Drucker's timeless thinking on management--distilled in this series of concise essays--examines the basic questions and issues that managers face. In rapidly changing times, Drucker's legendary wisdom is even more vitally relevant, going beyond traditional thinking to insights of enduring value.

The ideas and themes of this easy-to-read guide are based on direct experience and knowledge from Drucker's years as adviser to large corporations, entrepreneurial start-ups, government and nonprofit agencies, and public institutions. They are eminently practical and resonate profoundly with the challenges managers face today. Drucker offers insight and advice on perennial management issues such as:

• people decisions
• resource allocation
• productivity challenges
• innovation and risk management
• and other essential management topics

Filled with classic, evergreen advice--There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer--Peter F. Drucker on Management Essentials is widely regarded as the gold standard for managers.

Notable Quotes from Peter F. Drucker:

• Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.
• The best way to predict the future is to create it.
• Time is the scarcest resource, and unless it is managed nothing else can be managed.
• There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.
• Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.
• Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes.
• The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.

Peter F. Drucker (1909-2005) is one of the best-known and most widely influential thinkers on the subject of management theory and practice, and his writings contributed to the philosophical and practical foundations of the modern corporation.

Often described as the father of modern management theory, Drucker explored how people are organized across the business, government, and nonprofit sectors of society; he predicted many of the major business developments of the late twentieth century, including privatization and decentralization, the rise of Japan to economic world power, the critical importance of marketing, and the emergence of the information society with its implicit necessity of lifelong learning. In 1959, Drucker coined the term knowledge worker and in his later life considered knowledge-worker productivity to be the next frontier of management.

Peter Drucker died on November 11, 2005, in Claremont, California. He had four children and six grandchildren.

You can find more about Peter F. Drucker at cgu.edu/center/the-drucker-institute.