Criticism of Drucker's Work
The Wall Street Journal researched several of his lectures in 1987 and reported that he was sometimes loose with the facts. Drucker was off the mark, for example, when he told an audience that English was the official language for all employees at Japan’s Mitsui trading company. (Drucker’s defense: “I use anecdotes to make a point, not to write history.”) And while he was known for his prescience, he wasn’t always correct in his forecasts. He predicted, for instance, that the nation’s financial center would shift from New York to Washington.
Others maintain that one of Drucker’s core concepts—“management by objectives”—is flawed and has never really been proven to work effectively. Critic Dale Krueger said that the system is difficult to implement, and that companies often wind up overemphasizing control, as opposed to fostering creativity, to meet their goals.
Drucker's classic Concept of the Corporation criticized General Motors at a time when it was, in some ways, the most successful corporation in the world. Many of GM's executives considered Drucker persona non grata for a long time afterward. Alfred P. Sloan refrained from personal hostility toward Drucker, but even Sloan considered Drucker's critiques of GM's management to be "dead wrong".
Read more about this topic: Peter Drucker
Famous quotes containing the words criticism of, criticism and/or work:
“However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher—a Roosevelt, a Tolstoy, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It’s the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“[My early stories] are the work of a living writer whom I know in a sense, but can never meet.”
—Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)