Ninety-Nine Years of Peter Drucker

Today is Peter Drucker's Ninety-ninth birthday. Here's how his colleague, Gordon Bjork describes his legacy.

From the Wall Street Journal's November 25, 2005 letters to the editor:

The pages of the Wall Street Journal have been graced by the wisdom of Peter Drucker for more than 30 years ("An American Sage," editorial page, Nov. 14; "Drucker on Everything," Review & Outlook, Nov. 14; and "A Tribute to Peter Drucker" by Steve Forbes, editorial page, Nov. 15). I had the privilege of being his colleague at Claremont over the same period. He came to Claremont because his previous university would not give him the assurance that he could teach past 65. He was intellectually and professionally active for another 30 years and his work continued to evolve and deepen.

The public man was brilliant. The private man was an exemplar of personal concern for the welfare of others. Peter and Doris, his accomplished wife, frequently offered personal support to friends and colleagues, especially in times of stress.

Unlike many other academic "stars," Peter never shortchanged his own colleagues, students, or institution. Peter never demanded special consideration or compensation and taught a disproportionate number of students -- particularly in the Executive MBA program that he was instrumental in founding. He served insightfully on faculty committees. He had no teaching assistants and he read his students' papers himself. He had a standing offer to students to reread their reworked papers for a higher grade -- and he demanded the same high quality of exposition in their work that he exhibited in his own.

Because Peter's work focused on management, his published work did not extend as much to macroeconomics. But he was equally brilliant and prescient in this area. He rejected the mechanistic approaches of Keynes, the Monetarists, and the New Classical economists as useful ways of thinking about the dynamics of a market economy. He started the use of biological analogies for understanding the behavior of economic systems in the mid-1970s, before it was fashionable to do so. As others have noted in his approach to management, his genius was in asking the right questions and changing the conceptual framework for explaining the world. Peter was a polymath in an age of specialists and a wonderful human being.

Gordon Bjork

Professor of Economics, Emeritus

Claremont McKenna College

Claremont Graduate University

Claremont, Calif.