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:
“Cubism had been an analysis of the object and an attempt to put it before us in its totality; both as analysis and as synthesis, it was a criticism of appearance. Surrealism transmuted the object, and suddenly a canvas became an apparition: a new figuration, a real transfiguration.”
—Octavio Paz (b. 1914)
“It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“What is history? Its beginning is that of the centuries of systematic work devoted to the solution of the enigma of death, so that death itself may eventually be overcome. That is why people write symphonies, and why they discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves.”
—Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)