单选题
Why does Peter Drucker continue to enjoy such a high reputation? Part of the answer lies in people's mixed emotions about management. The management-advice business is one of the most successful industries of the past century. When Drucker first turned his mind to the subject in the 1940s it was a backwater. Business schools were treated as poor relations by other professional schools. McKinsey had been in the management-consulting business for only a decade and the Boston Consulting Group did not yet exist. Officials at General Motors doubted if Drucker could find a publisher for his great study of the company, "Concept of the Corporation". Today the backwater has turned into Niagara Falls. The world's great business schools have replaced Oxbridge as the nurseries of the global elite. The management-consulting industry will earn revenues of $300 billion this year. Management books regularly top the bestseller lists. Management masters can command $60,000 a speech. Yet the practitioners of this great industry continue to suffer from a severe case of status anxiety. This is partly because the management business has always been prey to fads and frauds. But it is also because the respectable end of the business seems to lack what Yorkshire folk call "bottom". Consultants and business-school professors are forever discovering great ideas, like re-engineering, that turn to dust, and wonderful companies, like Enron, that burst into flames. Peter Drucker is the perfect antidote to such anxiety. He was a genuine intellectual who, during his early years, rubbed shoulders with the likes of Ludwig Wittgenstein, John Maynard Keynes and Joseph Schumpeter. He illustrated his arguments with examples from medieval history or 18th-century English literature. He remained at the top of his game for more than 60 years, advising generations of bosses and avoiding being trapped by fashion. But Drucker was more than just an antidote to status anxiety. He was also a preacher of management. He argued that management is one of the most important engines of human progress: "the organ that converts a mob into an organization and human effort into performance". He endlessly extended management's empire. From the 1950s onwards he offered advice to Japanese companies as well as American ones. He insisted that good management was just as important for the social sector as the business sector.
单选题
The underlined word "it" in Paragraph 1 refers to _____.