THE EARLY YEARS
DRUCKER'S CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH IN VIENNA
Peter F. Drucker was born in Vienna on November 19, 1909 in Vienna, when the city was still the vibrant centre of the Habsburg monarchy. He grew up in Kaasgrabengasse, a tranquil avenue in the Viennese suburb of Döbling. His father Adolph was a high government official, his "strong-willed, argumentative and independent" mother Caroline, a former medicine student with an interest in psychiatry, ran the household. Peter and his younger brother Gerhard were surrounded by their adored Grandmother...
THE EARLY YEARS
APPRENTICESHIP IN HAMBURG
Austria of the inter-war period offered Drucker a good education, but no perspectives, and in 1927, after graduating from the Döbling Gymnasium, he left for Hamburg to complete a one-year apprenticeship at an old-established trading company.
Along with Drucker, seven other Gymnasium graduates began their merchant's apprenticeships - a novelty for the company, which specialized in the export of cotton, as until then, positions within the business had been inherited. The managing director, "Herr...
BIOGRAPHY
PETER DRUCKER AS JOURNALIST
Peter Drucker's first journalistic attempts were also made at this time. He began writing his first articles, such as for Der Österreichische Volkswirt (The Austrian Economist). Moreover, though more as a gesture to his father that out of his own interest, he began his studies of law, which he continued after moving to Frankfurt the following year. In Frankfurt he found a post at the daily Frankfurter General-Anzeiger, a regional rival newspaper to the famous Frankfurter Zeitung. The Frankfurter...
BIOGRAPHY
DRUCKER`S EMIGRATION TO ENGLAND
Immediately after Hitler took power in 1933 Drucker left Germany for London, where he found work first as a trainee with an insurance company, and then as chief economist of a private bank. Through the director of the bank, who was also from Austria, Drucker secured in 1934/35 a place in the legendary seminar of John Maynard Keynes in Cambridge, which he remembers as a theatrical one-man show.
In London Drucker reconnected with Doris Schmitz, born in Mainz, whom he had gotten to know at his...
BIOGRAPHY
HOW DRUCKER 'INVENTED' MANAGEMENT AT GM
Already in 1937, Drucker had emigrated to the USA, where he worked first as a free-lance journalist, chiefly for Harper's, but also for the Washington Post. At the beginning of the forties, he also began teaching political science and philosophy at Bennington College in Vermont.
At this time, Drucker also began his activities as a business consultant: In 1942, in his book The Future of Industrial Man, he had dealt with the development of society in the twentieth century and had come to the...
BIOGRAPHY
DRUCKER AS MANAGEMENT CONSULTANT
Since the 1940s, Drucker did consulting work for nearly every major corporation, including General Electric, Coca-Cola, Citicorp, IBM and Intel, but also for numerous governmental and non-governmental organizations both home and abroad. And he made the personal acquaintance of, as well as advised, nearly every key figure of the American economy in the second half of the 20th century: starting with Alfred Sloan, the legendary first general director of General Motors, and his colleague Charles E....
WRITINGS
Writings by Peter Drucker on Schumpeter, Keynes, Kierkegaard and Friedrich Julius Stahl
MODERN PROPHETS: SCHUMPETER OR KEYNES?
THE UNFASHIONABLE KIERKEGAARD
