Newt Gingrich on the life of Peter Drucker and his three-decade romance with Drucker’s ideas

I first learned about Peter Drucker more than 30 years ago from a professor at Georgia Tech. Although I was a student at Emory, I had been sent to Georgia Tech byGene Sanders, Georgia’s Republican state senator at the time, to see Pete Jensen, a computer-science professor there. If I really wanted to understand the modern world, Senator Sanders told me, Jensen could help me learn.

One of Jensen’s first observations was that I didn’t need to know about computers as much as I needed to know about thinking. And there was no better way to learn about thinking than to read Peter Drucker, he said. I started with Drucker’s The Concept of the Corporationwhen I was still an undergraduate at Emory in 1965. As a graduate student in Brussels, I came across The Effective Executive at the U.S. Information Agency library. It was an event that changed my life. To this day I recommend to virtually every group of students –in high schools, colleges, the military war colleges–as well as incoming members of Congress, that they buy a paperback copy of The Effective Executive so they can read it, underline it, and take it out once a year to reread it. It is the most powerful book I’ve encountered on how to be effective.

Next I read The Age of Discontinuity, a work that, along with Kenneth E. Boulding’sThe Meaning of the 20th Century and Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock and The Third Wave, clearly outlines the scale of change we’re living through. Anyone who goes back to that 30-year-old work by Drucker and looks at his analysis of change will discover that the book could have been written last year. It is a remarkable act of economic, technological, political, and cultural history.

To understand modern America, one has to understand the impact of the management revolution and the spread of routine “systematic habits of effectiveness” that enable ordinary people to accomplish extraordinary things. From small businesses to giant corporations to the world of government and the military, Drucker has had an impact on how we think about leadership, the management of people, the use of resources, and the development of plans and strategies. He is at the same time a systematizer of observations, a codifier of rules, and a popularizer of basic principles and habits. If you consider the number of people who have changed their behavior based on his principles, Drucker may well be the most influential writer of the 20th century.

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It is an old article, but reflects on Drucker’s monumental influence on his politics. Read the orginal article at Inc. magazine

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Tags: entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, Gingrich on Drucker, Management, management consultant, Newt Gingrich, Peter Drucker