Original management guru Peter Drucker, 95, dies

‘‘Peter could look around corners,’’ philanthropist Eli Broad, who knew Drucker for 30 years, said. ‘‘He would say things that seemed rather simple but in fact were very profound. He saw the future.’’

Former General Electric chairman Jack Welch credited a pithy question from Drucker with helping him understand how to restructure the far-flung GE empire, a sometimes-wrenching process that turned the company into a stock-market dynamo and made Welch one of America’s most celebrated managers.

‘‘Drucker said: ‘If you weren’t already in this business, would you enter it today? And if not, what are you going to do about it?” Welch recalled. ‘‘Simple, right? But incredibly powerful.’’ Drucker’s simple question ultimately led to Welch’s operating maxim that if a GE unit could not be No. 1 or No. 2 in its field, it should be jettisoned.

Claremont Graduate University said Drucker died of natural causes. He was the Marie Rankin Clarke professor of social sciences and management at Claremont from 1971 to 2003, and he continued to write from the campus until his death.

Drucker was often called the ‘‘father of modern management.’’ But on the occasion of his 90th birthday, he described his life work much more simply: ‘‘I looked at people, not at machines or buildings,’’ he said. That approach led to nearly three dozen books and thousands of articles that form nothing less than a guide to the 20th century economy.

The former newspaperman did not think up economic theories or elaborate systems of business operation. Rather, he looked at people working, put them in historical context and saw a new liberal art: management. ‘‘Unlike many philosophers, he spoke in plain language,’’ Intel Corp. founder Andy Grove said in a statement.

General Motors, which invited Drucker to study its corporate structure in 1943, provided his laboratory and his epiphany. At GM in wartime, Drucker found ‘‘the corporation as human effort people of diverse skills and knowledges working together in a large organisation,’’ he wrote in Concept of the Corporation, the 1946 book that emerged from his two years studying GM.

It was something new in world history, different from the ‘‘command and control’’ methods of organising labor that had characterised the building of the Pyramids or Napoleon’s army or even Henry Ford’s assembly line. ‘‘The overseer of the unskilled peasants who dragged stone for the Pyramids did not concern himself with morale or motivation,’’ Drucker wrote.

But modern management is different, he said. ‘‘Its task is to make people capable of joint performance, to make their strengths effective and their weaknesses irrelevant,’’ he said in various ways in his 18 books on the profession of management. —LAT-WP