Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005)—widely considered the world's foremost pioneer of management theory—was a writer, teacher, and consultant specializing in strategy and policy for businesses and social sector organizations. Drucker's career as a writer, consultant, and teacher spanned nearly 75 years, and he worked with a wide variety of organizations, including Procter & Gamble, General Electric, IBM, Girl Scouts of the USA, the Red Cross, and others. His groundbreaking work turned modern management theory into a serious discipline. He has influenced or created nearly every facet of its application, including decentralization, privatization, empowerment, and understanding of the knowledge worker. He authored 39 books and numerous scholarly and popular articles. He was an editorial columnist for the Wall Street Journal and a frequent contributor to the Harvard Business Review and other periodicals.

Drucker was born in 1909 in Vienna and was educated there and in England. He earned his doctorate in public and international law while working as a newspaper reporter in Frankfurt, Germany. He then worked as an economist for an international bank in London. Drucker moved to London in 1933 to escape Hitler's Germany and took a job as a securities analyst for an insurance firm. Four years later, he married Doris Schmitz, and the couple departed for the United States in 1937.

Drucker landed a part-time teaching position at Sarah Lawrence College in New York in 1939. He joined the faculty of Bennington College in Vermont as professor of politics and philosophy in 1942 and the next year put his academic career on hold to spend two years studying the management structure of General Motors. This experience led to his book Concept of the Corporation, an immediate best seller in the United States and Japan, which validated the notion that great companies could stand among humankind's noblest inventions. For more than 20 years, he was professor of management at the graduate business school of New York University. He was awarded the Presidential Citation, the university's highest honor.

Drucker moved to California in 1971, where he was instrumental in the development of the country's first executive master of business administration program for working professionals at Claremont Graduate University (then known as Claremont Graduate School). The university's management school was named the Peter F. Drucker Graduate School of Management in his honor in 1987. He taught his last class at the school in the spring of 2002. His courses consistently attracted the largest number of students of any class the university offered.

As a consultant, Drucker specialized in strategy and policy for governments, businesses, and nonprofit organizations. His special focus was on the organization and work of top management. He worked with some of the world's largest businesses and with small and entrepreneurial companies. In his later years, Drucker worked extensively with nonprofit organizations, including universities, hospitals, and churches. He served as a consultant to a number of agencies of the U.S. government and with the governments of Canada, Japan, Mexico, and other nations throughout the world.

Drucker has been hailed in the United States and abroad as the seminal thinker, writer, and lecturer on the contemporary organization. Drucker's work has had a major influence on modern organizations and their management for more than 60 years. Valued for keen insight and the ability to convey his ideas in popular language, Drucker often set the agenda in management thinking. Central to his philosophy is the view that people are an organization's most valuable resource and that a manager's job is to prepare and free people to perform. In 1997, he was featured on the cover of Forbes magazine under the headline “Still the Youngest Mind,” and Businessweek has called him “the most enduring management thinker of our time.”

On June 21, 2002, Drucker, author of The Effective Executive and Management Challenges for the 21st Century, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom—the nation's highest civilian honor—from President George W. Bush.

Drucker received honorary doctorates from numerous universities around the world, including universities in the United States, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Great Britain, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. He was the founding chairman of the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management, now the Frances Hesselbein Leadership Institute. He passed away on November 11, 2005, at age 95.