Peter Drucker’s Evolving Attitudes Toward Leadership
Cecilia B S Tsui (October 9, 2020)
Peter Drucker has written extensively on management and leadership. Despite his evident belief in its importance, leadership never became the focus of Drucker’s writing most of the time, until 1988. Why this strange conflict? (Cohen 2010: 15–18)
Drucker was Doubtful about Charismatic Leadership
An important point to note is that Drucker was doubtful about charismatic leadership (Riggio 2009). It is because he witnessed the rise of Hitler, whose title — Fuehrer — means “Leader” (Cohen 2010: 15–18). That association may well have had lifelong resonance. Drucker left Germany almost immediately after Hitler’s rise to power. Still, Hitler’s success baffled him. Why did so many people flock to his leadership? Drucker concluded, Hitler was a “misleader”. In his view, misleaders were “charismatic” — another characteristic of leadership that he had difficulty accepting. Drucker had an intellectual struggle with the notion of leadership during that period. Drucker’s conflict with leadership continued well into the 1970s (Cohen 2010: 15–18).
Changing Attitudes
After deliberation with William Cohen, one of Drucker’s students, in 1988, in an article titled “Leadership: More Doing Than…
