In 1937, the young Peter Drucker applied for a manager position in a machinery company in the United States. After layers of screening, only three candidates remained. In the last part, the president of the company personally served as the examiner, and he set the test questions: a batch of problematic products was sold to a very important old customer. ?
The first candidate said, “I’m going to take back all the problem products and supply him with an 80% discount in the future.” The second candidate added: “Not only do I want to give him an 80% discount, And he has to ask him to send someone to participate in the inspection every time the goods are distributed, so that he will trust us more.” The
president nodded and turned his attention to Drucker: “What do you think?”
Drucker said confidently: ” If it were me, this problem would not have arisen at all.” The
president was so satisfied with the answer that he hired Drucker as his manager. In the subsequent work, as Drucker said, he made the enterprise avoid many major problems through perfect management.
In 1939, according to the political situation at that time, Drucker predicted that the price of steel raw materials would rise sharply, and prepared steel raw materials worth 30 million US dollars in advance. As a result, there was a real shortage of steel materials a few months later.
In 1946, Drucker, who was a consultant at General Motors at the time, felt that the large-scale competition for “knowledge talents” would break out immediately, so the company hired a group of experienced automotive engineers with high salaries in advance. In the second year, the talent scramble battle between European and American automobile companies emerged.
In 1967, Drucker proposed that several of the companies he was working for at the time transitioned to environmentally friendly production. Four years later, the U.S. government promulgated the National Ambient Air Quality Standard and comprehensively rectified polluting companies. Many companies suffered fatal blows during the rectification, while the few companies he served as consultants escaped.
From 1939 to 2006, Drucker, known as the “Father of Modern Management”, wrote his management experience into more than 30 books including “The Practice of Management” and “The Effective Manager”. Whether it is Andy Grove, the founder of Intel Corporation, or Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft, both are inspired and influenced by Drucker in management thinking and management practice.
”If there really was a ‘master of masters’ in the world, that man’s name would have to be Peter Drucker. There are a lot of people who claim to be able to handle the toughest problems, but Drucker has never dealt with a big crisis because he used Wisdom fundamentally enables companies to avoid crises. This is the real ‘management magic.’ When Drucker announced his retirement in 1992, the British financial magazine The Economist made such an evaluation of him.
