One of the persons in our Corporate-Ethics.US™round table group of scholars is Marvin Brown, Ph.D.  His thinking on organizational ethics, expressed in a number of writings and lectures has lead to frequent invitations to speak. His most recent book, Corporate Integrity: Rethinking Organizational Ethics and Leadership, was simultaneously printed in two countries in 2005 but sold out quickly, and a second edition had to be printed the same year. Brown's concept of the corporation as patterns of communication and his concept of corporate ethics leadership for this century have been labeled the most innovative since Drucker's classic works.  So let's take a look at a few bits about Drucker and what he said.

Peter Ferdinand Drucker (November 19, 1909B November 11, 2005) was a writer, management consultant and university professor. His writing focused on management-related literature. Peter Drucker made famous the term A knowledge worker@ and is thought to have unknowingly ushered in the knowledge economy,

His career as a business thinker took off in 1945, when Donaldson Brown, the mastermind behind the administrative controls at GM, invited Drucker to conduct what might be called a political audit. The resulting book Concept of the Corporation popularized a corporate multidivisional structure.

Drucker was interested in the growing effect of people who worked with their minds rather than their hands. He was intrigued by employees who knew more about certain subjects than their bosses or colleagues and yet had to cooperate with others in a large organization. Rather than simply glorify the phenomenon as the epitome of human progress, Drucker analyzed it and explained how it challenged the common thinking about how organizations should be run.

His approach worked well in the increasingly mature business world of the second half of the twentieth century. By that time, large corporations had developed the basic manufacturing efficiencies and managerial hierarchies of mass production. Executives thought they knew how to run companies, and Drucker took it upon himself to poke holes in their beliefs, lest organizations become stale. But he did so in a sympathetic way. He assumed that his readers were intelligent, rational, hardworking people of good will. If their organizations struggled, he believed it was usually because of outdated ideas, a narrow conception of problems, or internal misunderstandings.

Here are some thought-provoking quotations from Drucker= s writings.

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