Drucker Opinion Essays from the WSJ

Posted on December 10, 2005  Comments (2)

The Wall Street Journal has posted selected opinion essays by Peter Drucker along with several tributes to Drucker.

The Five Deadly Business Sins (article removed so link removed), 1993:

  • the worship of high profit margins and of “premium pricing”
  • mispricing a new product by charging “what the market will bear
  • cost-driven pricing
  • slaughtering tomorrow’s opportunity on the altar of yesterday
  • feeding problems and starving opportunities

Is Executive Pay Excessive?, 1977. In 1977, his answer was, no. As pay did become excessive, Drucker became a prominent voice against the unjust pay of CEO’s.

Economically, [the] few very large executive salaries are quite unimportant. Socially, they do enormous damage. They are highly visible and highly publicized. And they are therefore taken as typical, rather than as the extreme exceptions they are.

In 1977, he was mainly worried about “the public” rising against excessive executive pay when there was no systemic problem. He didn’t seem to foresee the problem of other CEO’s believing they were entitled to such unjust pay and creating the crisis of leadership this caused later in his career. Of course the entitlement culture (update – link removed because page deleted) was not a widely held view at that point.

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2 Responses to “Drucker Opinion Essays from the WSJ”

  1. CuriousCat: Tilting at Ludicrous CEO Pay
    June 11th, 2007 @ 12:26 pm

    I continue to tilt at the robber barron CEO pay packages. Hopefully, at some point, the people approving these obscene pay packages can be shamed into stopping or replaced by people with some sense of decency…

  2. CuriousCat: Another Year of CEO's Taking Hugely Excessive Pay
    April 6th, 2009 @ 10:25 am

    Several of those taking the most from corporate treasuries in 2007, taxed the American public to replenish those treasures (and then proceeded to pay out “bonuses” to their compatriots from those treasuries and re-leveraging themselves with asset purchases). Merill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, American Express and Morgan Stanley required tens of billions of dollars in bailouts from USA taxpayers in 2008 and 2009…

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