The Essential Drucker : The Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker’s Essential Writings on Management (Paperback) by Peter F. Drucker

Almost everything that needs to be said about business management was said by Peter Drucker before anyone else. He coined the term “knowledge worker” before the Internet or even the PC was developed. Decades ago he talked about the need for personal development of business people. His writing is unusual in that it can be as useful to a business of 5 people as it is to one of 50,000.

If you have a desire to grow your company you must read this book. And I don’t often say must. Be prepared that as your company grows it will be different in structure not just in size. Your role and contribution must change as well. This book is not a “how to” for this process but the insight you will gain is quite powerful.

Drucker was nothing if not verbose. He has written 35 books and numerous articles. The Essential Drucker solves the problem of what to read when. It is a compendium of his works from 1942 to 1999, selected and arranged by him. “Is it dated?” would be the logical question to ask. The answer is, only in the most minor ways. His concept of entrepreneurship is not current, but quite useful. He uses it to refer to a business that is innovating rather than one that is just small. And talks a lot about how it takes different management and support to deal with an entrepreneurial company as opposed to an established one.

He writes mostly of a time when the changes to technology (and to business models that exploit it) were slower. That doesn’t make his insights any less powerful, but in some cases they need to be tweaked a bit. The tweaking would be easier if each chapter had the date of its original publication plainly visible. That is my only very minor complaint with this excellent book.