[via Tom Peters]

[…] Jack Welch was not the first CEO of GE, though to read Fortune in the ’90s one might have thought so. And Peter Drucker didn’t “invent” management. The Chinese probably did thousands of years ago—among other things, Sun Tzu’s roughly 2,500-year-old The Art of War is a full-blown “management” text. So, too, Machiavelli’s The Prince. And Frederick Taylor’s century-old The Principles of Scientific Management.

But Peter Drucker did arguably (1) “invent” modern management as we now think of it; (2) give the study and craft of management-as-profession credibility and visibility, even though biz schools like Harvard had been around for a long time; and (3) provide a (the first?) comprehensive toolkit-framework for addressing and even mastering the problems of emergent enterprise complexity.

And he did something else incredibly important: He popularized the study of-appreciation of modern management. Doubtless Mr Drucker would have been appalled to be described as a “popularizer”—after all, that was one of his abiding and biting criticisms of me. But the truth is that, though his consulting was carried out in the stratospheric confines of CEO-world, his books and articles were very comprehensible and accessible […]