Peter Drucker was born in Vienna in 1909 and became one of the most notable management thinkers of the 20th and 21st Centuries. He also became a prolific writer, he helped to build management education in the United States, based for many years at the Claremont College in California. By the time of his death in 2005, he had authored 39 books, countless other articles and writings and inspired many websites related to his work.

He worked as a journalist on newspapers in Germany and Austria, before emigrating to Britain in 1933, soon after the Nazis took power. There he worked in financial services in London before gaining a place to study economics at the University of Cambridge, attending the seminars of John Maynard Keynes. His book "The End of Economic Man", published in English 1939 and foreshadowing the rise of totalitarianism in Europe, was praised by Winston Churchill in a review for the Times Literary Supplement.

He had moved to the United States in 1937 and worked as a freelance journalist. In 1942, he began a career as a management consultant and in the following year embarked on a landmark study of General Motors Corporation, at the behest of the company's legendary chairman, Alfred Sloan. It led to a stream of works, starting with The Concept of the Corporation in 1946, a work that showed his independence of mind as it questioned many of the practices at one of the world's largest and most powerful organisations, and leading to the 1954 classic Principles of Management, a book still used today in many business schools around the world.