No Peter, no business

I want to read about other than my field, but recently I can't find enough time to do so. Peter F. Drucker is one of the authors I am interested in but whose books I haven't read. Most Japanese enterpreneurs have been influenced by them. As long as I looked over the information below, he is one of the greatest intellectuals, as people say.

According to Wikipedia (partly editted by outrageous2007):

Peter Ferdinand Drucker (November 19, 1909–November 11, 2005) was an author of management-related literature. George Orwell credits Peter Drucker as one of the only writers to predict the German-Soviet Pact of 1939.[1] Peter Drucker made famous the term knowledge worker and is thought to have unwittingly ushered in the knowledge economy, which effectively challenges Karl Marx's world-view of the political economy.

Several ideas run through most of Drucker's writings:

- A profound skepticism about macroeconomic theory. Drucker contended that economists of all schools fail to explain significant aspects of modern economies.
- A desire to make everything as simple as possible. According to Drucker, corporations tend to produce too many products, hire employees they don't need (when a better solution would be contracting out), and expand into economic sectors that they should stay out of.
- A belief in what he called "the sickness of government." Drucker made ostensibly non-ideological claims that government is unable or unwilling to provide new services that people need or want - though he seemed to believe that this condition is not inherent to democracy. Even successful programs, such as US Social Security, long ago ceased to be interesting to an increasingly alienated citizenry.
- The need for "planned abandonment." Corporations as well as governments have a natural human tendency to cling to "yesterday's successes" rather than seeing when they are no longer useful.
- The lasting contribution of the "father of scientific management", Frederick Winslow Taylor. Although Drucker had little experience with the analysis of blue-collar work (he spent his career analyzing managerial work), he credited Taylor with originating the seminally important idea that work can be broken down, analyzed, and improved.
- The need for community. Early in his career, Drucker predicted the "end of economic man" and advocated the creation of a "plant community" where individuals' social needs could be met. He later admitted that the plant community never materialized, and by the 1980s, suggested that volunteering in the non-profit sector might be the key to community.
- He wrote extensively about Management by objectives
- A company's primary responsibility is to serve its customers, to provide the goods or services which the company exists to produce. Profit is not the primary goal, but rather an essential condition for the company's continued existence. Other responsibilities, e.g., to employees and society, exist to support the company's continued ability to carry out its primary purpose.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Drucker