• by Dave Morgan , Featured Contributor, March 6, 2025

Peter Drucker is broadly considered to be the most important business management consultant of the modern era. And, while he famously said “the purpose of a business is to create and keep customers," he also made clear that business leaders' responsibilities went well beyond that.

According to Drucker, “Leaders in every single institution and in every single sector… have two responsibilities. They are responsible and accountable for the performance of their institutions, and that requires them and their institutions to be concentrated, focused, limited. They are responsible also, however, for the community as a whole.”

Peter Drucker had a very good reason to demand that business leaders not shirk responsibilities to their communities.

He literally had a front row seat to Mussolini's and Hitler's rallies in the 1930s. Most don't realize that Drucker began his career as a political scientist and journalist. It was only after his work analyzing General Motors’ extraordinary retooling of its assembly lines to meet Allied needs during World War II, chronicled in his book, “The Concept of the Corporation,” that his business management career took off.

Drucker spent the early 1930s in Italy writing about the fascist movement there. He wrote that economic issues related to failures in both pure capitalism and pure communism had created a very dangerous “despair of the masses,” which was made worse by failures of institutions like Christian churches, government, business and labor organizations to either address the roots of the problems or derail the rise of the fascists led by Mussolini, who was expert at exploiting that societal despair.

Drucker's thesis argued that this totalitarian movement could and would overtake all of Europe.

But no one would publish Drucker’s thesis. Publishers believed that Drucker was naive, that what was happening in Italy was an isolated case, and his claim that charismatic totalitarian leaders could overrun all of Europe was too fantastical. Undeterred, Drucker moved his reporting to Germany, and was literally in the meeting halls in the early and mid1930s watching Hitler and Goebbels lead Nazi party rallies, rising to power by exploiting the same conditions and themes as Mussolini.

Only once Drucker moved to the U.S. in 1937 to teach was he able to find a willing publisher, and only after he agreed to add a chapter arguing that a similar totalitarian movement could not happen in the U.S. The book, "The End of Economic Man: The Origins of Totalitarianism” is a must-read if you want to understand totalitarian movements.

What was clear in Drucker’s analysis is that incumbent institutions did not take seriously either the movements as they were forming and growing, or the roots of the despair of the populace. They dismissed the rhetoric of fascist leaders as illogical and ridiculous. Drucker watched crowds at Nazi rallies roar in delight at proclamations like, “We don't want lower bread prices, we don't want higher bread prices, we don't want unchanged bread prices— we want National Socialist bread prices.”

Why should business leaders today care about what Peter Drucker saw and wrote 90 years ago? It was the failure of business leaders in the 1930s, both to speak up and to find solutions to some of the societal challenges, that helped fuel the rise of unchecked, ruthless governments that initiated a war in which more than 50 million people died -- and conducted the murderous and genocidal holocaust, something that we must all never forget.

And yes, this means that political dialogue will invade what some might like to keep as “neutral” spaces. It will invade -- and must invade — social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and, yes, even LinkedIn, given how important they are today and how weakened more traditional, journalistically led media platforms have become.

Yes, even LinkedIn. We as business leaders, team leaders, business practitioners cannot pretend that we don’t have a critical role in the health and functioning of our communities. Democracies cannot function without robust dialogue, dissent, participation, and raised voices.

The consequences of silence are too great.