Peter Drucker

Peter Drucker (1909-2005) founded modern management thinking and wrote the discipline's most famous definition: because the purpose of a business is to create a customer, it has exactly two basic functions, marketing and innovation, and everything else is cost. For Drucker, marketing was not a department but the whole business seen from the end result: the customer. His work anchors the service view of marketing: understanding what the customer values and organising the firm around it. Reducing marketing to promotion loses Drucker's core point, which is to make selling superfluous because the product fits so well it sells itself.

Key work The Practice of Management (1954); Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973)

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