Management: Shaping the Future of the Human Dimension
Piero Formica

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Practices akin to Bible scriptures, which require an exercise in logic to understand their meaning, are the distinctive feature of management as it has evolved during successive industrial revolutions. Humanism – a way of life centered on human values and a critical spirit – is forced within a “sacred” enclosure, and the human dimension of management is shrinking even more with the growing performance of a wide range of technologies that replace human beings in the adoption and implementation of managerial practices.   Staunch supporters of the claim that existing knowledge is the source from which most innovation stems lead the managerial enterprise. They are managers in the shoes of Ptolemaic “knowledgists” who search paths […]

Is Facebook causing the end of happiness?
by Vivek Wadhwa

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For the past 30 years, most of us around the globe have welcomed modern technology with few questions and fewer reservations. We have treated each new product as a “solution” and paid little attention to its accompanying problems. The past six months, though, has seen a rapid change of opinion in the United States, as many in the technology elites have called GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon) and other tech giants to account. One of the most outspoken of Silicon Valley’s moguls, Roger McNamee, who was a mentor to Mark Zuckerberg, has published several articles highly critical of Facebook and has just launched a campaign, “Truth About Tech”, to educate the world about the evils of Big […]

What do we mean by “the human dimension of management”?
by Prabhu Guptara

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“Hey!  Management is about nothing but the human dimension!” was the response of a friend when I told him that I was writing an article on this subject. From one point of view, that is true. Yet we all know that most discussion of “real management” – e.g. in a Board or business meeting, in an MBA or in Executive Education – focuses rather on finance, supply chains, and all sorts of other things. Clearly, the human dimension is only one dimension of management. In fact, it is usually considered a less important dimension than finance: isn’t finance the only thing that companies are required to report on, in most of the world? So perhaps […]

Can The Drucker Forum Establish The Human Dimension Of Management?
Steve Denning

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In November 2018, the world’s leading management conference—the Global Peter Drucker Forum—will debate a profound question: “management—the human dimension.” A cast of eminent thinkers and executives will consider nothing less than the possibility of “a business reformation”— something analogous to Martin Luther’s call of 1517 for the Roman Catholic Church to abandon the sale of indulgences. The Drucker Forum invites us “to rethink how organizations, businesses, are actually run, why they are run, and what their purpose and role are in society.” The Three Responsibilities of Management In responding to this call, a good starting point is Peter Drucker’s 1954 classic book, Management, which formulated three responsibilities of management: assuring the performance of the institution […]

Management Needs to Return to Reason
by David Hurst

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‘The arts of life…turn out to possess their own special methods and techniques…Bad judgement here consists not in failing to apply the methods of natural science, but, on the contrary, in over-applying them’. Isaiah Berlin, Political Judgement Ever since the European Enlightenment reason has been regarded as the hallmark of our humanity. The French philosophes argued that it was the power of abstract thought that separated us from animals. Only reason promised a certainty that could free us from the tyranny of tradition, dogmatic faith and arbitrary rule. Reason and rationality There was, however, not a single Enlightenment. While the French took Descartes as their model and focused on the supremacy of his rational method, […]

A business reformation: lighting the flame
by Charles Handy

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Five hundred years ago an unknown friar in an unknown German town laid a complaint against his employer. The friar was Martin Luther, the town Wittenberg. His employer was the Catholic Church, and the burden of his complaints – 95 of them – was twofold. First, to be permitted to buy your way to heaven – as the church offered through the sale of indulgences – was wrong: a scam on the poor to make the rich richer, which sounds familiar today. The second was that the route to heaven was not through what you did, which after all was laid down by the organization, but through what you were. He called this “justification by […]

“We can make business competition extinct.”
by Anne Twombly

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The largest and most lasting idea that I’ve taken from the Drucker forum is the words of a fellow challenge winner, Nayyara Rahman: “We can make business competition extinct.” That short, bold statement contained an idea that I never thought was possible. As most do, I viewed competition as a fundamental aspect of business. Competition certainly isn’t always negative, and there are plenty of examples of competition being the driving force for progressive improvement. But it is critical to remember that change is possible, even at the very foundation. I heard these words against a backdrop of red curtains in a theater, a few hours before the 9th Global Peter Drucker Forum officially opened. I […]

Please welcome CSR 2.0
by Henry Mintzberg

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(See lisamintzberg.com for more of her photography.)   I address this especially to business executives, but as citizens of their societies and neighbors in their communities.   Why do we focus on the conditions of our problems instead of addressing their root causes? Medicine, for example, gives far greater attention to treating diseases than to preventing what caused them in the first place. Jonas Salk provided a telling exception: instead of treating polio, he created a vaccine to eradicate it.   0.0, 1.0, 2.0    Much the same can be said about corporate social responsibility, or CSR. A corporation is considered responsible when it attends to the evident conditions of some social or environmental problem. But […]