Drucker's public life began with the publication of his 1939 book, "The End of Economic Man," which analyzed the rise of totalitarian societies such as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. It was favorably reviewed by Winston Churchill, not yet Britain's prime minister, at the tail end of his years as an outsider in the British establishment. Churchill had been marginalized for his eloquent warnings about the dangers of appeasing Hitler's Germany.

Churchill wrote in the Times of London on May 27, 1939: "Mr. Drucker is one of those writers to whom almost anything can be forgiven because he not only has a mind of his own, but has the gift of starting other minds along a stimulating line of thought."

What was Churchill ready to "forgive" Drucker for? His outlandish forecast that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany would become allies. What two societies could be further apart than "Far Right" Nazism and "Far Left" Communism?

But Drucker had analyzed the organizational underpinnings of both systems. Each society was totalitarian and resisted realities that conflicted with their extreme ideologies. Like two hallucinating psychotics, Drucker suggested, they inevitably would be more comfortable with each other than with societies in the middle of the political -- and psychological -- spectrum.

Three months later, Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact and invaded Poland, starting World War II. One year later, when Churchill became prime minister and minister of defense, he ordered a copy of "The End of Economic Man" issued to every British military officer.

Drucker was one of the three most influential management theorists of the modern era, along with Frederick Taylor and Edwards Deming. Their contributions extended the continuum of knowledge on how to create wealth and enable liberty in capitalist democracies:

Frederick Taylor: Taylor created "time and motion studies," which measured and standardized how workers perform specific tasks. He was reviled for restricting worker's creativity and autonomy, but the resulting increase in productivity led to higher salaries and the rise of an industrial middle class.

Edwards Deming: The father of total quality management, Deming intertwined operations research and organizational behavior, giving workers the opportunity and motivation to leverage statistics -- specifically a discipline called statistical process control -- to improve customer satisfaction.

Peter Drucker: Drucker recognized that nongovernmental institutions, whether business or nonprofit, are the essential organization of modern society. He was as interested in the Girl Scouts, to whom he consulted for years, as in General Motors, the subject of his classic book "The Concept of the Corporation."

Drucker once quoted Samuel Johnson that "Man never does less damage than in the pursuit of commerce." A market-driven society might be distasteful aesthetically or trivial morally. But it has no incentive to be evil, unlike totalitarian societies that tyrannize on behalf of ideology.

Drucker was a strong advocate of free markets and ideas, but an unconventional one. He was critical of wasteful U.S. energy policies and was impatient with executives who did not exert themselves to understand the true nature of their companies' value proposition. Memorably, he described racial segregation as "a sin, not a crime."

In a delightful 1984 interview in the Claremont Review of Books (www.startribune.com/595), Drucker explained why he chose to study management over economics or political science, and viewed himself as a journalist more than an academic, though he was both: "I'm not a bit interested in the behavior of commodities, and only interested in the behavior of people. ... I went to management because it was the one discipline in which I could apply all the liberal arts. ... You can play "Mary Had a Little Lamb" with one finger, but you can't play much more than that. Economics always tries to play Beethoven with one finger, and it doesn't really come off."

He had an impish sense of humor. A friend of mine who was in his Ph.D. program at Claremont College in the 1970s described Drucker arriving for a graduate seminar one day and announcing he had designed a model for assessing what percentage of drivers picked their noses at stoplights.

Drucker wrote in a voice of supreme confidence, proclaiming his conclusions and debunking conventional wisdom. Yet his writings are not arrogant. That he was almost always correct, often decades in advance, was a big part of it. His unusually clear style of writing, his intellectual integrity and curiosity, and his personal cheerfulness and religious faith factored in as well.

Drucker was supremely American, despite his baritone Austrian accent and courtly Old World manners, He undoubtedly would have been greatly influential had he stayed in Europe. But his seriousness of purpose combined with his love of the new made him very accessible to American audiences and to executives in Westernized societies around the globe.

Drucker was a personal hero of mine, and it gave me great pleasure to write a column three years ago on the occasion of his 93rd birthday (www.startribune.com/596).

Like George Orwell, Peter Drucker was a visionary who valued reality over theory, and whose integrity -- intellectual and moral -- glowed throughout his writing. It is not an insult to other management gurus to say he has no replacement. He will be read through the ages.