2024

A New Age of Generativity
by Joseph Pistrui and Dimo Dimov

“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” — Neil Armstrong, Astronaut

With these iconic words in 1969, Neil Armstrong marked a moment of human achievement that transcended its immediate context. His words symbolized not only a monumental accomplishment but also the broader potential for human progress.
That same year, Peter Drucker foresaw a different leap for mankind: the rise of the knowledge worker. This prompted different thinking about resources. Unlike physical resources, knowledge is renewable and can be expanded in novel ways. Thus, managing and empowering knowledge workers presented new challenges for modern management, where innovation and continuous learning became essential in the knowledge economy.[
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2024

Restoring Humanity to Management (and wisdom to intelligence)
by David K. Hurst

Anglo-American management theory has often been portrayed as a chaotic battleground, where scientists and humanists clash, embodying ‘hard’ versus ‘soft’ management styles. It’s time to understand that this conflict is not a flaw but a defining feature—a critical tension that reflects the human condition. Our paradoxical nature is the essence of our humanity, and it is through the practical integration of seemingly irreconcilable opposites that we weave the very fabric of our existence.[
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2024

Public Perception of AI: Bridging the Gender Chasm
by Jayshree Seth

With artificial intelligence (AI) poised to reshape work and the global workforce, a troubling pattern has emerged: a significant gender gap in the adoption and usage of AI. This disparity not only reflects existing inequalities but also threatens to exacerbate them, potentially impacting the future of knowledge work in ways that could set back progress on gender equality for generations. Addressing this imbalance is not just a matter of fairness—it’s an economic imperative that will determine the competitiveness of nations, the public perception of emerging technologies and the inclusivity of our technological future.[
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2024

The Future Will Be Temporary; Leadership Too
by Bill Fischer

They call him “the Boss,” and, not so long ago, rock and roll legend Bruce Springsteen contemplated his career and reminisced that:
“We have the only job in the world where the people you went to high school [with] 
 you’re still with those people
..You live your life with them. You see them grow up. 
.. You see them get older. You see their hair go gray. And you’re in the room when they die, you know?”[1][
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2024

The Future of Knowledge Work: What Drucker can teach us
By Karen Linkletter

As we consider the concept of knowledge work today, we are faced with several challenges. How do we motivate increasingly independent workers to be part of an organization or a team? How do we measure and evaluate knowledge worker productivity? How do knowledge workers face the ever-changing landscape of AI and associated technologies? Although he has been gone for almost 20 years, Peter Drucker identified the shift towards knowledge work, and left us some very sound advice for navigating the rough waters we now confront.[
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2024

The Productivity Paradox of 21st Century Knowledge Work
By Isabella Mader

1994:

“Can I ask you something?”

“Sure! Great to see you! Come in, have a seat. Coffee?”

2024:

“Just a quick question…”

” Sorry, no time! Can you email me about it
?”

What happened? In his Management Challenges for the 21st Century, Peter Drucker noted that a key accomplishment of the 20th century was a fiftyfold increase in the productivity of manual labor. He predicted that the critical contribution of management in the 21st century would be to similarly enhance the productivity of knowledge work. Two decades into the 21st century, however, we are far from realizing this vision.[
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2024

From “Next” Management to “Beyond” Management
By Winfried Felser

As every year, the international management community will meet in Vienna at the Drucker Forum in November to debate the urgent issues of our time. This time, however, the event feels more like a bracket round Drucker Forum topics of recent years – “ecosystems”, “leadership” and “the human dimension”, for example.
All of them can be grouped under the common label of the “Next Management”. A management “next” has long been a necessity, if not a “beyond” that may be more appropriate for multi-disruption – more on that later. In any case, whether continuing linearly or disruptively shaken, management as we know it is creaking under pressure from drivers including technology (AI), new business logics (platform economy, ecosystems) or from a VUCA world that is becoming brittle, anxious, non-linear, and incomprehensible – BANI. This is the “why?” of change.[
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