Brexit: Crisis and Opportunity – Nothing Lasts Unless Incessantly Renewed
by David Hurst

Posted on 1 CommentPosted in 8th Global Peter Drucker Forum

Multilayered complex systems are stable when the large and/or slow processes govern through constraint the smaller, faster ones. Sudden change can take place when agents at a lower level escape the restrictions of agents higher in the system, disrupting the whole. This principle applies to all complex systems from golf swings to management organizations and political structures.   The Founding Fathers ensured that this was the case in the structure of the American government when they wisely arranged the different branches of government in a systems hierarchy of constraint. The House of Representatives is elected every two years, Presidents every four years, the Senate every six years (on staggered terms) and the Supreme Court is […]

Management Wisdom: Recovering the Tension Between the Hard and the Soft
by David Hurst

Posted on Leave a commentPosted in 8th Global Peter Drucker Forum

In The Witch Doctors: Making Sense of the Management Gurus (1996, revised 2011) John Micklethwait (former editor-in-chief of The Economist, now of Bloomberg News) and Adrian Wooldridge (Schumpeter columnist for The Economist) identified four defects in management theory: That it was constitutionally incapable of self-criticism Its terminology confuses rather than educates It rarely rises above common sense It is faddish and bedeviled by contradictions They declared management theory “guilty” on all charges in various degrees, and went on to identify the root cause of the problem as an “…intellectual confusion at the heart of management theory; it has become not so much a coherent discipline as a battleground between two radically opposed philosophies. Management theorists […]

What is an Entrepreneurial Society?
by David Hurst

Posted on Leave a commentPosted in 8th Global Peter Drucker Forum

What is an entrepreneurial society? I think of it as a socio-economic system that is capable of constantly renewing itself. It retains its identity by constantly recycling and restructuring its elements. It achieves that elusive quality that Peter Drucker looked for in organizations throughout his career – a “balance” between continuity and change, order and movement.   For basic illustrations one can turn to nature. Ecosystems like temperate forests offer an example that may be paradigmatic; the innovative process begins in an open patch, where there is equal access to sun and rain and space for small-scale experimentation. We call the pioneers that come into this patch “weeds” – fast-moving organisms with simple structures, suited […]

Claiming Our Humanity in a Digital Age: Big Questions in Vienna
by David Hurst

Posted on Leave a commentPosted in 7th Global Peter Drucker Forum

The theme of the 2015 Drucker Forum that ended in Vienna two weeks ago was “Claiming Our Humanity: Managing in a Digital Age”. Nearly 500 management academics, business people and management consultants from all over the world attended the two-day conference in Vienna.   The preliminary events began with a CEO Roundtable on the afternoon of Wednesday November 6. The opening ‘provocation’ was supplied by Tom Davenport and Julia Kirby’s June 2015 Harvard Business Review article “Beyond Automation”. In it they address the threat that artificial intelligence in the form of smart machines is encroaching on knowledge work to such an extent that it will lead to widespread unemployment. In the past machines took over […]

Claiming Our Humanity: Pope Francis and the 7th Global Drucker Forum
by David Hurst

Posted on 2 CommentsPosted in 7th Global Peter Drucker Forum

Claiming Our Humanity: What the Pope Francis’ Encyclical on the Environment Brings To The 7th Global Drucker Forum   To students of management Pope Francis is a fascinating study in leadership and organizational change. From his surprise election as an outsider, the first Jesuit and non-European Pope in history, to his well-publicized efforts to shake up an aging institution by revisiting its mission and purpose, he exemplifies the behavior of a charismatic, transformational leader. His many actions to distance himself from the trappings of power that he believes separate him from the reality of the situation on the ground have been well documented. Now he has written a powerful, brilliantly-crafted papal letter (encyclical) on the […]

Don’t Throw the Past Away: Rediscovering the “Drucker Space”
by David Hurst

Posted on Leave a commentPosted in 7th Global Peter Drucker Forum

For Peter Drucker history was an essential resource. Commentators have described the scope of his writings as “Braudelian” in honor of the work of historian, Fernand Braudel, the leader of the French Annales school of history, renowned for its broad, integrative approach. Drucker’s illustrations of organization and change included both the British Raj in India and the Meiji Restoration in Japan. A trio of little-known German thinkers, Willem von Humboldt (1767-1835), Joseph von Radowitz (1797-1853) and Friedrich Julius Stahl (1802-1861) informed his understanding of what it took to preserve the traditions of the past while facilitating rapid change.   Ever since the reform of the American business schools in the late 1950s, however, the perceived […]

Post-Rational Management? Reflections on the Global Drucker Forum 2014
by David Hurst

Posted on Leave a commentPosted in 6th Global Peter Drucker Forum

The 6th Global Drucker Forum ended on November 14 with a series of comments and calls to action from the major speakers involved. The last of these was HBS professor Clay Christensen, who called for more cooperation and harmonizing of language among management experts. He illustrated the kind of cooperation he was talking about with a story about Florida governor Jeb Bush and how he had shared slides from a presentation on the topic of child-centred education and the reform of the American education system. Forbes columnist Steve Denning quoted Christensen’s story in full and suggested that this is the way the management field should be headed. I didn’t agree and responded to his column. […]

The Mongrel Discipline of Management
by David Hurst

Posted on Leave a commentPosted in 5th Global Peter Drucker Forum

This is a cross-post from the HBR Complexity Serieswritten by David K. Hurst, and is one of the perspectives relating to the 2013 Drucker Forum Theme (“Managing Complexity”).   Humans engage with their world in two reciprocal ways: firstly as passionate participants and secondly as detached observers. As managers we cycle between these modes constantly. It’s the mark of a great manager to be able to judge, in a complex situation, when and how to use each of them.   Detached observation requires a certain maturity. Consider that we are born into the world immersed in context. We are embodied organisms, fine-tuned by evolution to garner cues to action from our surroundings. We pay attention when […]