BusinessWeek.com

Peter Bergen, who oversees the project, says that with improvements in intelligence and munitions, the percentage of civilian deaths has dropped from about 40 percent in the Bush years, to “low single digits” now. Bergen says the administration's ...

As good American patriots celebrated the Fourth of July by blowing stuff up, international diplomats were gathering in New York for month-long treaty negotiations over a sector of the world economy that generates about $55 billion in exports each year: the arms trade. A strong and comprehensive treaty would benefit America’s national security—yet when it comes to regulating the global trade in weapons, America is shooting itself in the foot.

For those of you who never bothered to pay attention to your mother, perhaps you'll listen to Peter Drucker, the father of modern management, instead.

This cheeky thought has crept into my head a couple of times in the last few weeks as I've noticed a run of stories about etiquette (or lack thereof) in the workplace. Most recently, there was the case study posted on this Web site (BusinessWeek.com, 8/12/08) about a worker who had to deal with a boorish boss.

When the House passed legislation in late June that expanded protections for disabled people, it marked an important step forward on an important issue. But what the workplace needs, even more than a new law, is an old insight -- one first offered by Peter Drucker more than 40 years ago.

"To make strength productive is the unique purpose of organization," Drucker wrote in his 1967 classic, The Effective Executive. "It cannot, of course, overcome the weaknesses with which each of us is abundantly endowed. But it can make them irrelevant."

Lyndon Johnson occupied the White House when KeyCorp first began raising its dividend. The Beatles topped the pop charts. Martin Luther King Jr. led tens of thousands of civil rights marchers through Alabama.

As Barack Obama claimed the Democratic nomination for President last week, pundits were quick to credit any number of factors in his vanquishing of the once-vaunted Clinton political machine: Obama's rock-star charisma, his scintillating speechmaking, what he himself has described as his "almost spooky good fortune."

But I chalk it up, in large measure, to one thing: his superior ability -- or at least his advisers' superior ability -- at management, Peter Drucker-style.

Thirty-five years ago, in his classic Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, Peter Drucker declared that the means by which most people had long run their organizations -- through a mix of perks and punishment, rewards and reprimands -- was all but dead.

"The basic fact," Drucker wrote, "is that the traditional... approach to managing, that is the carrot-and-stick way, no longer works."

John D. Rockefeller has been described in many different ways: as greedy and cutthroat, as munificent and caring, as "solitary, taciturn, remote, and ascetic," in the words of author Daniel Yergin. But as a manager, perhaps Rockefeller's most indispensable quality was this: He was uncompromisingly forward-looking.

It was Rockefeller, more than any single figure, who helped revolutionize the way people in the 19th century illuminated their homes, hastening the shift from costly whale oil to kerosene -- a fuel that was, as he put it, "cheap and good."

Of all of Peter Drucker's achievements -- advising captains of industry and heads of state, coining the term "knowledge worker," winning the Presidential Medal of Freedom -- the most remarkable may be this: In 1974, his 800-plus-page tome, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, vaulted past The Joy of Sex on the national best seller list.