I'll start with a quote from him:--------------------------------------------------------------------Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship... the act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth.Peter Drucker, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, 1985American (Austrian-born) management writer (1909 - 2005)--------------------------------------------------------------------A great loss to the world, now that he's no more.I've been a great fan of his work for some time now. First time I heard of him was when, as a newbie project leader in Infosys Technologies , my then boss, Ajay Dube , (who is currently the COO at Persistent Systems ), gave all his direct reports a copy of this article by Drucker:My Life as a Knowledge WorkerPrint version of the article:I really liked that article a lot. Very inspiring ...I've put below an excerpt from it, upto "THE THIRD EXPERIENCE".Read the entire article at the URL above, its really worth it.You can also get this article with a Google search for '"Peter Drucker" + Verdi'.Excerpt from the article:'The leading management thinker describes seven personal experiences that taught him how to grow, to change, and to age--without becoming a prisoner of the pastI was not yet 18 when, having finished high school, I left my native Vienna and went to Hamburg as a trainee in a cotton-export firm. My father was not very happy. Ours had been a family of civil servants, professors, lawyers, and physicians for a very long time. He therefore wanted me to be a full-time university student, but I was tired of being a schoolboy and wanted to go to work. To appease my father, but without any serious intention, I enrolled at Hamburg University in the law faculty. In those remote days--the year was 1927--one did not have to attend classes to be a perfectly proper university student. All one had to do to obtain a university degree was to pay a small annual fee and show up for an exam at the end of four years.THE FIRST EXPERIENCETaught by VerdiThe work at the export firm was terribly boring, and I learned very little. Work began at 7:30 in the morning and was over at 4 in the afternoon on weekdays and at noon on Saturdays. So I had lots of free time. Once a week I went to the opera.On one of those evenings I went to hear an opera by the great 19th-century Italian composer, Giuseppe Verdi--the last opera he wrote, Falstaff. It has now become one of Verdi's most popular operas, but it was rarely performed then. Both singers and audiences thought it too difficult. I was totally overwhelmed by it. Although I had heard a great many operas, I had never heard anything like that. I have never forgotten the impression that evening made on me.When I made a study, I found that this opera, with its gaiety, its zest for life, and its incredible vitality, was written by a man of 80! To me 80 was an incredible age. Then I read what Verdi himself had written when he was asked why, at that age, when he was already a famous man and considered one of the foremost opera composers of his century, he had taken on the hard work of writing one more opera, and an exceedingly demanding one. "All my life as a musician," he wrote, "I have striven for perfection. It has always eluded me. I surely had an obligation to make one more try."I have never forgotten those words--they made an indelible impression on me. When he was 18 Verdi was already a seasoned musician. I had no idea what I would become, except that I knew by that time that I was unlikely to be a success exporting cotton textiles. But I resolved that whatever my life's work would be, Verdi's words would be my lodestar. I resolved that if I ever reached an advanced age, I would not give up but would keep on. In the meantime I would strive for perfection, even though, as I well knew, it would surely always elude me.THE SECOND EXPERIENCETaught by PhidiasIt was at about this same time, and also in Hamburg during my stay as a trainee, that I read a story that conveyed to me what perfection means. It is a story of the greatest sculptor of ancient Greece, Phidias. He was commissioned around 440 b.c. to make the statues that to this day stand on the roof of the Parthenon, in Athens. They are considered among the greatest sculptures of the Western tradition, but when Phidias submitted his bill, the city accountant of Athens refused to pay it. "These statues," the accountant said, "stand on the roof of the temple, and on the highest hill in Athens. Nobody can see anything but their fronts. Yet you have charged us for sculpting them in the round--that is, for doing their back sides, which nobody can see.""You are wrong," Phidias retorted. "The gods can see them." I read this, as I remember, shortly after I had listened to Falstaff, and it hit me hard. I have not always lived up to it. I have done many things that I hope the gods will not notice, but I have always known that one has to strive for perfection even if only the gods notice.THE THIRD EXPERIENCETaught by JournalismA few years later I moved to Frankfurt. I worked first as a trainee in a brokerage firm. Then, after the New York stock-market crash, in October 1929, when the brokerage firm went bankrupt, I was hired on my 20th birthday by Frankfurt's largest newspaper as a financial and foreign-affairs writer. I continued to be enrolled as a law student at the university because in those days one could easily transfer from one European university to any other. I still was not interested in the law, but I remembered the lessons of Verdi and of Phidias. A journalist has to write about many subjects, so I decided I had to know something about many subjects to be at least a competent journalist.The newspaper I worked for came out in the afternoon. We began work at 6 in the morning and finished by a quarter past 2 in the afternoon, when the last edition went to press. So I began to force myself to study afternoons and evenings: international relations and international law; the history of social and legal institutions; finance; and so on. Gradually, I developed a system. I still adhere to it. Every three or four years I pick a new subject. It may be Japanese art; it may be economics. Three years of study are by no means enough to master a subject, but they are enough to understand it. So for more than 60 years I have kept on studying one subject at a time. That not only has given me a substantial fund of knowledge. It has also forced me to be open to new disciplines and new approaches and new methods--for every one of the subjects I have studied makes different assumptions and employs a different methodology.I'v collected some links related to Peter Drucker, for those interested in knowing more of him and his work:The above link does not seem to be working - but put it anyway because the main site looks interesting ...A message from the President of CGUExcerpts from the above news article:Peter Drucker, the ''father of modern management,'' is seen at Claremont Graduate University in California in this photo from 1999. Drucker died on Friday of natural causes, a spokesman from the university said.PHOTO: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICEPeter Drucker, revered as the father of modern management for numerous books and articles stressing innovation, entrepreneurship and strategies for dealing with a changing world, has died. He was 95....His ability to explain his principles in plain language helped them resonate with ordinary managers, former Intel Corp chairman Andy Grove said."Consequently, simple statements from him have influenced untold numbers of daily actions. They did mine over decades," Grove said....Business Week magazine hailed Drucker as "the most enduring management thinker of our time," and Forbes magazine featured him on a 1997 cover under the headline: "Still the Youngest Mind."...US President George W. Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2002....Drucker showed a knack for identifying sea changes in business and economics years in advance. He foresaw the emergence of a new type of worker whose occupation would be based on knowledge, not physical labor or management.Persistent Systems founderI met Anand once, at an exhibition of the Computer Science department of Pune University, where students were showing their projects. He came across as a nice and unassuming person. Looks like Persistent is doing quite well nowadays - good for them.