Peter F. Drucker discusses how the new paradigms of management have changed and will continue to change our basic assumptions about the practices and principles of management. Forward-looking and forward-thinking, Management Challenges for the 21st Century combines the broad knowledge, wide practical experience, profound insight, sharp analysis, and enlightened common sense that are the essence of Drucker's writings and "landmarks of the managerial profession." --Harvard Business Review

For most people, inside and outside management, this assumption is taken as self-evident. Indeed management writers, management practitioners and the laity do not even hear the word "management"; they automatically hear BUSINESS MANAGEMENT.

This assumption regarding the universe of management is of fairly recent origin. Before the 1930s the few writers and thinkers who concerned themselves with management -- beginning with Frederick Winslow Taylor around the turn of the century and ending with Chester Barnard just before World War II -- all assumed that business management is just a subspecies of general management and basically no more different from the management of any other organization than one breed of dogs is from another breed of dogs.

The first practical application of management theory did not take place in a business but in nonprofits and government agencies. Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915), the inventor of "Scientific Management," in all probability also coined the terms "Management" and "Consultant" in their present meaning. On his calling card he identified himself as "Consultant to Management" -- and he explained that he had intentionally chosen these new and strange terms to shock potential clients into awareness of his offering something totally new. But Taylor did not cite a business but the nonprofit Mayo Clinic as the "perfect example" of "Scientific Management" in his 1912 testimony before the Congress which first made the United States management-conscious. And the most publicized application of Taylor's "Scientific Management" (though aborted by union pressure) was not in a business but in the government-owned and government-run Watertown Arsenal of the U.S. Army.

The first job to which the term "Manager" in its present meaning was applied was not in business. It was the City Manager -- an American invention of the early years of the century. The first conscious and systematic application of "management principles" similarly was not in a business. It was the reorganization of the U.S. Army in 1901 by Elihu Root (1845-1937), Theodore Roosevelt's Secretary of War.

The first Management Congress -- Prague in 1922 -- was not organized by business people but by Herbert Hoover, then U.S. Secretary of Commerce, and Thomas Masaryk, a world-famous historian and the founding President of the new Czechoslovak Republic. And Mary Parker Follett, whose work on Management began at roughly the same time, never differentiated between business management and nonbusiness management. She talked of the management of organizations, to all of which the same principles applied.

What led to the identification of Management with Business Management was the Great Depression with its hostility to business and its contempt for business executives. In order not to be tarred with the business brush, management in the public sector was rechristened "Public Administration" and proclaimed a separate discipline -- with its own university departments, its own terminology, its own career ladder. At the same time -- and for the same reason -- what had begun as a study of management in the rapidly growing hospital (e.g., by Raymond Sloan, the younger brother of GM's Alfred Sloan) was split off as a separate discipline and christened "Hospital Administration."

Not to be called "management" was, in other words, "political correctness" in the Depression years.

Peter F. Drucker was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1909. Educated in Austria and in England, Mr. Drucker holds a doctorate in Public and International Law from Frankfurt University in Germany. He also has received honorary doctorates from American, Belgian, Czech, English, Japanese, Spanish and Swiss universities. Since 1971, Mr. Drucker has been Marie Rankin Clarke Professor of Social Science and Management at Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California, which named its Graduate Management Center after him in 1987.

In addition to teaching, Mr. Drucker currently acts as a consultant, specializing in strategy and policy for both businesses and nonprofits, and in the work and organization of top management. He has worked with many of the world's largest corporations and with small and entrepreneurial companies; with nonprofits such as universities, hospitals and community services; and with agencies of the U.S. Government as well as with Free-World governments such as those of Canada and Japan. In the past, Mr. Drucker has variously been economist for an international bank in London; American economist for a group of British and European banks and investment trusts; and American correspondent for a group of British newspapers.

From 1950 to 1971, Mr. Drucker was Professor of Management at the Graduate Business School of New York University which awarded him the university s highest honor, the Presidential Citation in 1969. From 1979 to 1985, he also served as Professorial Lecturer in Oriental Art at Pomona College, one of the Claremont Colleges. He also acted as Professor of Politics and Philosophy at Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont.

A prolific writer on subjects relating to society, economics, politics and management, Mr. Drucker has published 30 books which have been translated into more than twenty languages. In addition to his writings on management and economics, he has written an autobiographical book entitled, Adventures of a Bystander, and co-authored Adventures of the Brush; Japanese Paintings. Mr. Drucker has made several series of educational movies based on his management books, and he was an editorial columnist for the Wall Street Journal from 1975 to 1995, and serves as a frequent contributor to magazines.

Mr. Drucker is married and has four children and six grandchildren.