"You don't need swimming suits because it's just men here today," replied Drucker. "The executives explained that they hadn't brought their swimming trunks. Despite having the reputation as one who promoted respect for the worker and beliefs that employees are assets and not liabilities, Peter Drucker will always be linked to Jack Welch and General Electric’s policy of outsourcing in the 1980’s and ’90’s.While he had been an advisor for General Electric since the 1950’s, it was during his first meeting with new CEO Jack Welch in 1981 that Drucker asked the following question:“If you weren’t already in this business, would you choose to get into it now?”That question prompted Welch to begin the process of shedding any business in which GE could not be number one or number two. At the end of the same year, with Drucker's guidance and participation, Peter F. Drucker Academy was set up.“Among all of the business books, writings by Drucker influence me the most.”“My first central idea for General Electric back in 1981 came from Peter Drucker.”“Mention the name of Peter Drucker and many an ear in the business forest stands up straight.” 148 Connaught Road West, Hong Kong Shortly after Welch became CEO of General Electric in 1981, for example, he sat down with Drucker at the company's New York headquarters. He was always able to discern trends -- sometimes 20 years or more before they were visible to anyone else. ) to Grove of Intel.-- It was Drucker who introduced the idea of decentralization -- in the 1940s -- which became a bedrock principle for virtually every large organization in the world.-- He was the first to assert -- in the 1950s -- that workers should be treated as assets, not as liabilities to be eliminated.-- He originated the view of the corporation as a human community -- again, in the 1950s -- built on trust and respect for the worker and not just a profit-making machine, a perspective that won Drucker an almost godlike reverence among the Japanese.-- He first made clear -- still the '50s -- that there is "no business without a customer," a simple notion that ushered in a new marketing mind-set.-- He argued in the 1960s -- long before others -- for the importance of substance over style, for institutionalized practices over charismatic, cult leaders.-- And it was Drucker again who wrote about the contribution of knowledge workers -- in the 1970s -- long before anyone knew or understood how knowledge would trump raw material as the essential capital of the New Economy.Drucker made observation his life's work, gleaning deceptively simple ideas that often elicited startling results. He became an American citizen in 1943.In the summer of 1999, Mr. Shao Ming Lo met Mr. Peter F. Drucker with a proposal of setting up an institute. He never had a secretary and usually handled the fax machine and answered the telephone himself -- he was something of a phone addict, he admitted.Yet Drucker also was an intensely private man, revealing little of his personal life, even in his own autobiography, It was Doris, in her own unpublished memoir, who told the story of how she once locked Drucker in a London coal cellar to hide him from her disapproving mother. ), said after Drucker's death. When conglomerates were the rage, he preached against reckless mergers and acquisitions. But technology and capital are simply tools. His focus was always on management in general, not marketing per se, Senior Vice President, General Counsel & Secretary Appointed April 2018 Leads the company’s global legal, compliance and ethics, corporate secretary and environment health & safety organizations. Although he maintained a coterie of corporate followers, he increasingly turned his attention to nonprofit leaders, from Frances Hesselbein of the Girl Scouts of the USA to Rick Warren, founding pastor of Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif. Warren, author of Still, it was clear Drucker cared deeply about how he would be remembered. To gain a $20 million gift for its puny endowment, de Kluyver agreed in 2003 to put another name on the school, that of Masatoshi Ito, the founder of Ito-Yokado Group, owner of 7-Eleven stores in Japan and North America.