Managers can influence employees’ daily motivation for the work by using a number of tools. Below, I list five of them (of course, this is not a comprehensive list). In terms of their effectiveness as management tools for influencing motivation, how would you order them, with 1 being the most effective and 5 being the least effective? […]
Continue reading
Everyone recognizes the rapidly evolving world of work with social, technology, economic, political, environmental, and demographic (STEPED) disruptions. While it might have been possible before to focus on customer or strategy or technology or culture or people or leadership or new HR operating models, today’s complex and rapidly changing business context requires alignment, integration, and simplicity in the face of complexity. Let me suggest three simple (not easy!) principles shaping the new world of work. […]
Continue reading
All today I have heard my parents in my head. Primarily a Handy twinkle, as I’m not sure my father really believed in having lots of leaders.
He did believe in leadership, though – don’t panic!
Dad would see leaders as more like gamekeepers than the traditional tour guide model.
You know the type: umbrella in the air, standing in front … “Follow me, just listen to me and only look at what I point at.” […]
Business expansion presents organisations with dilemmas as old as commerce itself: how to scale without sacrificing human connection, and how to balance the demands of stability with the imperatives of adaptability. Insight into these challenges can be found not merely in contemporary management literature but also in the enduring structures of the Greek and Roman theatres in Syracuse, Sicily—each an ancient template for organisational design, and more significantly, for cultivating a culture fit for change.[…]
Continue reading
Peter Drucker did not simply name the knowledge economy — he equipped us to navigate it. His central insight was profound: when knowledge became the primary resource of advanced economies, the knowledge worker would become the defining agent of value creation.[…]
Continue reading
At the Management Summit Lisbon 2025, Richard Straub opened with a Druckerian provocation: management must keep asking what kind of management society needs next. The event itself was built to do that; “Value Creation”, its guiding theme, aimed to transform conventional management, emphasizing how human relationships, trust, and structural agility can drive organizational vitality.[…]
Continue reading
In an era defined by rapid innovation and relentless change, the bureaucratic hierarchy—once a symbol of industrial efficiency—has become a liability, stifling creativity, disengaging talent, and impeding value creation. […]
Continue reading
Following the Second World War, western societies built what was called “social capitalism” (Richard Sennett): an economic system which was dominated by long-term employment, strong unions, stable organizations and long innovation cycles.
This changed from the 1970s. So-called “flexible capitalism” was on the rise and with it came significant changes in economic conditions inside and outside its organizations. These conditions are well-known: massive digitalization, faster innovation cycles, growing dependencies concerning supply chains across borders, increasing political instabilities, weakening unions and the rise of flexible job conditions, often to the disadvantage of the employee. […]
In an age when machines can learn almost anything, the true work of leadership is learning how to cultivate what machines cannot — understanding, trust, and the conditions for human flourishing.
Artificial Intelligence has achieved what Peter Drucker once called the triumph of knowledge. It can summarize, simulate, and predict with astonishing speed — yet it cannot understand. AI holds humanity’s accumulated intelligence but not its lived wisdom.[…]
Leadership as we’ve known it is faltering. The pace of change has outstripped our mental models, and the heroic ideal of the all-knowing leader can no longer bear the weight of complexity.
As artificial intelligence automates knowledge, institutions struggle with legitimacy, and ecosystems demand collective adaptation, the old forms of leadership—hierarchical, centralized, control-oriented—can no longer keep up.[…]
