Drucker on Leadership: New Lessons from the Father of Modern Management

Part IV. Motivation and Leadership

For years, even though Drucker almost completely ignored the topic of leadership as such, he wrote extensively about motivation. In his very first book, published in 1939, Drucker argued that in effect what dictatorships did was substitute security, stability, and order as a motivator for the traditional financial motivations provided by the capitalist system.^[151]

Although he continued thinking and writing about motivation over the years, he did not make a connection between motivation and leadership, probably because he did not attempt to unify his theories of leadership until relatively late in his career. Yet Drucker did list motivating as one of the "basic operations" of a manager's work.^[152]

Typically, his ...