Peter Drucker

If you have ever heard a manager talk about setting objectives and then holding themselves to them, the idea traces back to the man who did more than anyone to popularise it. Management by objectives and self-control — the notion that people work best when they know what they are aiming at and take responsibility for getting there — became one of the concepts most closely associated with his name.

He worked as a consultant, an educator and an author, and his writing shaped both the theory and the day-to-day practice of management. Before him, management was often treated as something picked up on the job rather than studied; he has been described as the champion of management as a serious discipline, and he was among the leaders in building management education into a field of its own.

Born in Vienna in 1909, he was Austrian by birth and American by later life, and he wrote as a columnist and economist as well as a management thinker. He died in 2005, days short of his ninety-sixth birthday. The reason his lines still circulate is that they were never abstract: they were written for people who had to run something.