The Frontiers of Management

'This collection is full of lessons and teaches them superbly. This is vintage Drucker.'
Management Today

Born in Vienna in 1909, Peter F. Drucker was educated in Austria and England. From 1929 he was a newspaper correspondent abroad and an economist for an international bank in London. Since 1937 he has been in the United States, first as an economist for a group of British banks and insurance companies, and later as a management consultant to several of the country's largest companies, as well as leading companies abroad. Drucker has since had a distinguished career as a teacher, first as Professor of Politics and Philosophy at Bennington College, then for more than twenty years as Professor of Management at the Graduate Business School of New York University. Since 1971 he has been Clarke Professor of Social Science at Claremont Graduate School in California. In addition to his management books, Peter Drucker is also renowned for his prophetic books analysing politics, economics and society. These books span fifty years of modern history beginning with The End of Economic Man (1939) and including The Practice of Management; Innovation and Entrepreneurship; Managing in the Next Society; Management Challenges in the 21st Century; The Effective Executive and The Essential Drucker.

I Economics: the changed world economy; America's entrepreneurial job machine; why OPEC had to fail; the changing multinational; managing currency exposure; export markets and domestic policies; Europe's high-tech ambitions; what we can learn from the Germans; on entering the Japanese market; trade with Japan; the perils of adversarial trade; modern prophets - Schumpter or Keynes. II People: picking people, the basic rules; measuring white-collar productivity; twilight of the first-line supervior?; overpaid executives - the greed effect; over-age executives - keeping firms young; paying the professional schools; jobs and people - the growing mismatch; quality education - the new growth area. III Management: management - the problems of success; getting control of staff work; slimming management's midriff, are labor unions becoming irrelevant?; union flexibility - why it is now a must; management as a liberal art. IV The organization: the hostile takeover and its discontents; the five rules of successful acquisitions; the innovative organization; the no-growth enterprise; why automation pays off; IBM's Watson - vision for tomorrow; the lessons of the bell breakup; social needs and business opportunities. Afterword: social innovation; management's new dimension.