The Economist on Drucker

Trusting the teacher in the grey-flannel suit:

He was a harsh critic of the assembly-line system of production that then dominated the manufacturing sector – —partly because assembly lines moved at the speed of the slowest and partly because they failed to engage the creativity of individual workers.

The biggest problem with evaluating Mr Drucker’s influence is that so many of his ideas have passed into conventional wisdom “in other words, that he is the victim of his own success. His writings on the importance of knowledge workers and empowerment may sound a little banal today.

I look forward to the day when this next idea is conventional wisdom, and the practice stops:

In the late 1990s he turned into one of America’s leading critics of soaring executive pay, warning that “in the next economic downturn, there will be an outbreak of bitterness and contempt for the super-corporate chieftains who pay themselves millions.”