A retail chain wanted its apprentices to show up more reliably, so it paid them a bonus for attendance. Absences went up by about half, which came to more than five additional days per person per year, and they stayed up after the bonus ended. Jakob Alfitian, Dirk Sliwka and Timo Vogelsang ran it across 232 stores and 346 apprentices and published it in Management Science as “When Bonuses Backfire”.[…]
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An executive is asked how far along his company is with AI. He answers precisely: two pilots, one policy, forty people trained. Every word is accurate, and it describes a tenth of what is going on there. In the same week, a function that arrived with a March software update is pre-sorting job applications in his HR department. Nobody decided this. Nobody concealed it either. It came with the release notes.[…]
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The Global Peter Drucker Forum wrestles with a deceptively simple question: when everything depends on ingenuity, where does it actually come from?
The theme challenges organizations to unlock the next generation of innovation. Yet in almost every organization I work with, the same uncomfortable truth surfaces: the ingenuity is already there. It shows up in a sales rep’s instinct, a project manager’s half-voiced concern, an engineer’s spreadsheet no one requested. The problem is not a lack of creativity or talent. The problem is that organizations have become highly effective at filtering out what they already know.[…]
In Blog 1, we described the unmanaged state of management with the default mode of “muddling through” that so many organizations find themselves trapped in. In Blog 2, we unpacked the nine features that define mastery in management from diagnostic to interactive and from human to regenerative.
Now the question becomes: How do we get there?
How do we move from where we are to where we want to be without getting lost, stuck, or overwhelmed?[…]
In our first blog, we talked about the unmanaged state which describes how many organizations today are stuck in a cycle of “muddling through,” led by outdated management models and well-meaning but overwhelmed leaders. We made the case for better management, not more control but more clarity and capability.
Now let’s zoom in on what better management actually looks like.[…]
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Much of leadership today feels like guessing in the dark. We dress it up with overused buzzwords, dashboards, and KPIs—but behind the curtain, many organizations are still “muddling through” using management techniques developed in the industrial 20th century. Decisions are reactive rather than proactive. Strategies are stuck in the past. And leaders? Too often, executives become overwhelmed by firefighting instead of shaping the future. More often than not, they chase the next big thing—currently AI—instead of simply managing better.
Continue readingHave you ever seen a tree start growing beside its parent or have you ever seen trees grow alone in
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