Report on the Round Table ‘Peter F. Drucker and the Society of the Future’
by David Hurst

Panelists: Chair: Richard Brem, Senior Advisor, Peter Drucker Society of Europe, Peter Paschek, Management Consultant, Timo Meynhardt, Professor for Business Psychology and Leadership, HHL Leipzig Graduate School of Management, Verena Ringler, Curator, Erste Foundation Aaron Barcant, Independent Researcher, Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy The round table began with Richard Brem introducing the panelists and each of them summarizing why Peter Drucker’s work and vision mattered to them. Drucker’s vision Drucker always argued that one’s worldview mattered to one’s understanding of one’s role and contribution in society and one’s ability to manage oneself and others. American philosopher Thomas Sowell, describes a vision as a ‘pre-analytic, cognitive act’ that helps simplify an overwhelmingly complex reality. Think […]

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Preparing leaders for tomorrow: revisiting Drucker’s lost art of management
by Simon Caulkin

If the 20th was the management century and the 21st the century of leadership, as GDPF2020 proposes, what does that mean for management development and education? What are the challenges, and how can they be met? This was the subject of a two-part pre-conference panel workshop under the title Preparing Leaders for Tomorrow: Revisiting Drucker’s lost art of management, led by Ulrich Hommel, Director of Business School Development at EFMD GN and Professor of Corporate and Higher Education Finance at EBS Business School. The challenges to leaders are indeed formidable, not least the emergence of inter-institutional ecosystems involving complex feedback mechanisms which make outcomes for participants difficult to predict and harder to manage. An important […]

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Understanding how digital ecosystems are created
by Omar Valdez-de-Leon

Throughout the modern industrial era, industries have generally been organised as linear value chains, producing vertically integrated organisation, organised to control the entire value chain and achieve economies of scale, to create a competitive advantage. As digital technologies gain adoption, they enable new ways of organising how value is created. This transition to digital ecosystems is challenging. There is still limited knowledge of how these ecosystems are created, how they work and how organisations can best participate in such ecosystems. Drucker Forum 2019 This article is one in the “shape the debate” series relating to the 11th Global Peter Drucker Forum, under the theme “The Power of Ecosystems” taking place on November 21 & 22, […]

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Mudlarking in the social ecology of cities – breaking the public-policy impasse
By Martin Ferguson

I’d like you to imagine for a moment … we are standing on the banks of the River Thames. We are going ‘mudlarking’ – combing the shore – to discover British experience of how place-based leveraging of social ecologies is changing the fortunes of people and their city environments and how cities are breaking the public-policy impasse of recent decades that has allowed the wellbeing of significant parts of their places to be forgotten, to be placed in the ‘too difficult’ box. Our mudlark began by observing numerous signs of the public policy impasse facing cities, including: a ‘new normal’ of perma-austerity, with unsustainable rises in demand for services that were conceived for different times […]

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Growing Innovation
by Janka Krings-Klebe

Unlike classic collaboration setups, open business ecosystems are not limited in their possibilities. Participating companies can combine their capabilities more quickly in order to jointly exploit new opportunities. Drucker Forum 2019 This article is one in the “shape the debate” series relating to the 11th Global Peter Drucker Forum, under the theme “The Power of Ecosystems” taking place on November 21 & 22, 2019 in Vienna, Austria.#GPDF19 #ecosystems Flexibility and speed in cross-company collaboration is what distinguishes ecosystems from other business setups. Innovation superclusters are a special kind of ecosystem, with one additional distinctive feature: they make it simple to quickly grow innovations to profitable size. Innovators in superclusters can easily partner with corporations in […]

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