Managing the Corporate State

Abstract

The tide of the Second World War was turning against the Germans and Japanese in late 1943 when Peter Drucker, an independently minded economics professor at Bennington College in New England, received a telephone call from General Motors. Donaldson Brown, the vice chairman, had been impressed by Drucker’s book, The Future of Industrial Man, and its conclusion that business enterprise had become the “constitutive institution of industrial society.”¹

Men have become the tools of their trade.

(Henry David Thoreau, 1817–62)