Born on November 19, 1909 in Vienna, Peter Drucker was well known for his writings in the field of economics earning the moniker “the man who invented management” from no less than the Business Week. Drucker was born in a family of intellectuals that normally played host to renowned personalities in the field of economics, politics, music, and science. Drucker considered this background his first education. He went on to study admiralty law in the 1920s and had to move to Germany in the process. He enrolled at Hamburg University and later on at Frankfurt University. He also worked as senior editor at the Frankfurter General-Anzeiger, which is one of Germany’s largest newspapers. In 1932, Drucker completed his studies in international law at Frankfurt University, but was forced to leave Germany three years later. This was because two of his writings were banned by the Nazis. He married his wife Doris Schmitz in 1934 in England and the couple moved to the United States in 1937 where Drucker worked as a correspondent for several British newspapers – one of which was the Financial Times (Drucker Institute n.p.).
In the US, Drucker extensively wrote and published many books on economics and management. He also taught economics, philosophy, politics, and management in various universities and colleges in New York, such as the Sarah Lawrence College, Bennington College and New York University where he taught for 21 years. During this time, he had the opportunity to closely examine the workings of the big names in the industry, such as General Motors, Sears, Roebuck and IBM, to name a few. As a result he was able to write extensively and authoritatively on the subjects of management, corporations and related subjects. His book The Practice of Management, which was published in 1954, was the first book that approached organizational systems from a holistic point of view piecing altogether all the aspects of running a business. It was also in this book that the term ‘knowledge work’ was first coined. It was, however, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices that was considered as Drucker’s greatest work because it served as the go-to reference for many generations of executives and managers. Drucker died at the age of 95 leaving behind him a great body of work, citation of honors and awards. Among the honors he received was the Presidential Medal of Freedom – the highest honor that could be bestowed to a civilian - in 2002 from President Bush (Drucker Institute n.p.).
The Economist wrote of the importance and contribution of Peter Drucker to the world of business management in 2009 in honor of the man’s centenary (Schumpter n.p.). The article referred to Drucker as the man who modernized the concept of management and business consulting turning it from an insignificant field to a veritable gold mine. Thus, in the 1940s General Motors was doubtful whether Drucker could even sell his book Concept of the Corporation noting that it was such an uninteresting subject. Today, however, business and management consulting is a 300 billion dollar industry, thanks to Drucker. This article seems to highlight the qualities of Drucker that can be found only in the greatest of men: innovative, a pioneering spirit, daring and profoundly deeply intelligent. More than that, Drucker had persistence – he extensively and vigorously hawked the ideas he believed in to achieve the changes he believed should take place in the industry to revolutionize it for the better.
B. CHARLIE MUNGER
Charlie Thomas Munger is ranked by Forbes as the 1476th billionaire in the world and the 470th in the United States. He was not always a rich man, however, because he went through a difficult life of economic hardship while growing up in Omaha, Nebraska where he was born on January 1, 1924. In his teens, he had to work in a grocery store called Buffet & Son to eke out a living. Although he was able to secure enrollment in the University of Michigan in 1941, he nevertheless had to leave school to enlist in the Army Air Corps and served as a meteorologist during the Second World War. He married Nancy Huggins and bore three children with her. The two moved to Boston so Munger could study at the Harvard Law School. Munger graduated magna cum laude although he did not have an undergraduate degree. He immediately found work with Wright & Garrett - a law firm in California moving his family thereto for that purpose. After eight years of marriage to Nancy, the two called it quits in 1953. The divorce left him with nothing except for a son who contracted cancer and died a year later. One of Drucker’s eyes had to be removed also because of severe pain (Value Walk).
Munger moved back to his hometown in Omaha in 1959 and it was during this time that he began to find interest in business. Surprisingly, the person who would persuade him towards this direction was his old boss of the Buffet & Son store – a boss he never got to meet while he was working in the store, but only after several years later at a dinner party when he no longer had connection with the store. Warren Buffet is a business mogul himself and he was instrumental in persuading Munger to leave his law practice and go into business instead. Munger’s initial venture into business was buying into the stocks of a troubled transformer company in California, but back in Omaha after talking with Buffet and after leaving his practice, Munger went into full investing partnership. This was in 1962, and in the course of his investment partnership from 1962 to 1975, the partnership earned an average of 24.3% every year. In 1978, Munger joined Buffet’s Berskshire Hathaway Inc as vice-chairman (Value Walk). Munger has successfully established a name not only in the field of investment, but also in philanthropy. In 2013, he gave $100 million to the University of Michigan for the school’s new graduate residences and in 2014 the University of California received $65 million for a new visitor’s residence of its Santa Barbara’s Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (Forbes).
An interview by the Wall Street Journal published in 2014 (Zweig n.p.) showed the kind of businessman Munger is – independent-minded, humble and most of all, pragmatic. The article pictured Munger as a person who could both be tirelessly verbose and terse – when he wants to - at the same time. The interview revealed a very independent-minded person behind the man with a $1.33 billion net worth. Although his fortune was partially owed to his benefactor Buffet who cemented his resolve to leave his legal practice and go into investment and who is also the chairman of the company that is the primary source of his wealth, he did not mince words in stating that he does not idolize Ben Graham the way Buffet idolizes him. He criticized Graham as largely shaped by his trauma of the Depression thereby limiting his business ideas. Another quality of the man that can be gleaned from the interview is that for all his business successes he is a humble man. He displayed this when he admitted that he is not a prodigy, but simply happens to be in the right company of people who share the same ideas and temperament that “compensates for lack of IQ points” (qtd. in Zweig). Most of all, Munger is a very practical man – a realist whose eyes are very wide open. One of the man’s obvious philosophies that he eloquently stated in the interview is self-awareness of one’s limitations as a key to business success. For Munger, one can survive in this world only when he knows the extent of what he can or cannot do. That is one pragmatic man right there.
Works Cited
“Charlie Munger Resource Page.” Value Walk. 2016. Web. 1 May 2016. ˂http://www.valuewalk.com/charlie-munger-page/˃.
“Peter Drucker’s Life and Legacy.” Drucker’s Institute. 2016. Web. 1 May 2016. ˂http://www.druckerinstitute.com/peter-druckers-life-and-legacy/˃.
“Remembering Drucker.” The Economist. 19 November 2009. Web. 1 May 2016. ˂http://www.economist.com/node/14903040˃.
“The World’s Billionaires: #1476 Charles Munger.” Forbes. 2016. Web. 2 May 2016. ˂http://www.forbes.com/profile/charles-munger/˃.
Zweig, Jason. A Fireside Chat with Charlie Munger. Wall Street Journal. 12 September 2014. Web. 2 May 2016. ˂http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2014/09/12/a-fireside-chat-with- charlie-munger/˃.
