He coined the term knowledge worker in 1959.
Peter Ferdinand Drucker was born in Vienna in 1909 into a household of intellectuals. His parents hosted evening salons attended by economists, politicians, and scientists, including Joseph Schumpeter.1 Drucker studied law at the University of Frankfurt, earning a doctorate in international and public law in 1931.2 When Hitler rose to power in 1933, Drucker fled to England, then moved to the United States in 1937.
In 1943, General Motors invited Drucker to study its organizational structure. The resulting book, Concept of the Corporation (1946), was the first comprehensive analysis of a major corporation as a social institution.3 No academic had attempted anything like it.
Drucker published The Practice of Management in 1954, the book he later said laid the foundations of management as a discipline.4 In it, he introduced management by objectives, the idea that managers and employees should agree on specific goals and measure results against them. In 1959, he coined the term "knowledge worker" to describe employees whose primary contribution was intellectual rather than manual.5
Over six decades, Drucker published thirty-nine books. He consulted for IBM, General Electric, Procter & Gamble, and Intel, as well as nonprofit organizations and government agencies.
Drucker taught at New York University from 1950 to 1971, then at Claremont Graduate University from 1971 until shortly before his death.6 In 2002, President George W. Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Asked near the end of his life what he considered his most important contribution, Drucker replied that he had focused the discipline of management on people and power, on values and responsibilities, and had established it as what he called a truly liberal art.7
Drucker died on November 11, 2005, in Claremont, California, eight days before his ninety-sixth birthday. BusinessWeek had named him the man who invented management.8