Peter F. Drucker, RIP

• The purpose of marketing is to make selling unnecessary. - Drucker

LA Times: ...He had an acute sense and knowledge of history. In "Management Challenges for the 21st Century," a book he published in 1999, Drucker noted that the high tech entrepreneurs so lionized today appeared before in history, after the invention of the printing press in 1450.

For 50 to 100 years, printers were showered with honors and riches, as developers of computers and software are today. But then printing came to be taken for granted, and the printers' place of honor was taken by publishers, the controllers of "content".

A patient and humorous man — father of three daughters and a son, grandfather of six — Drucker had a keen eye for the ways individuals develop in society. To a magazine writer who sought guidance for an article on the role of business schools, Drucker advised: "Don't go to Harvard, but to the business school at the University of Scranton. That's where they are changing lives."

Drucker was precise in teaching business managers what they were to do, from determining "the purpose of the business," as he put it, to identifying the customer of the company.

"Profit," he taught generations of business leaders, "is not a reward of doing business but a cost," because it must be paid out to those who financed the business or plowed back in to allow the business to continue.