Peter Drucker, the most influential management writer of the modern era, has died age 95. A spokesman for the Claremont Graduate University in California, where Prof Drucker worked since the 1971, said he died peacefully on Friday morning after a short illness.

Prof Drucker remained active until the end of his life. Earlier this year he was honoured with the McKinsey Award for the best article published in the Harvard Business Review during 2004. He had just finished collaborating with colleagues on a reworking of the ideas contained in The Effective Executive, first published in 1966.

Peter Ferdinand Drucker was born in Vienna in 1909. He took a doctorate in public and international law while working as a newspaper reporter in Frankfurt, Germany, and then worked as an economist for an international bank in London. He moved to the US in 1937 and began his teaching career at Bennington College, Vermont. For more than twenty years he was professor of management at the graduate business school of New York University.