A Nod From the Homeland

Peter Drucker was born in Austria in 1909, and then left to go study and work in Germany in 1927. He didn’t last long. By 1933, he had fled for Britain and, a few years after that, the U.S.

“All around me society, economy and government—indeed civilization—were collapsing,” Drucker later recalled of his decision to leave Germany, where the Nazis had burned and banned some of his earliest writings.

Things, of course, have changed completely in the decades since Drucker’s departure. And so it was fitting this week to see Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a leading German paper, rank Drucker as the year’s most influential management thinker.