{"id":2505,"date":"2020-02-06T11:43:23","date_gmt":"2020-02-06T10:43:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.druckerforum.org\/blog\/?p=2505"},"modified":"2023-11-01T15:41:51","modified_gmt":"2023-11-01T14:41:51","slug":"preparing-leaders-for-tomorrow-revisiting-druckers-lost-art-of-management","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.druckerforum.org\/blog\/preparing-leaders-for-tomorrow-revisiting-druckers-lost-art-of-management\/","title":{"rendered":"Preparing leaders for tomorrow: revisiting Drucker\u2019s lost art of management <\/br>by Simon Caulkin"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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If the 20th was the management century and the 21st the century of\nleadership, as GDPF2020 proposes, what does that mean for management\ndevelopment and education? What are the challenges, and how can they be met?\nThis was the subject of a two-part pre-conference panel workshop under the\ntitle <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Preparing Leaders\nfor Tomorrow: Revisiting Drucker\u2019s lost art of management<\/strong>,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

led by Ulrich Hommel, Director of\nBusiness School Development at EFMD GN and Professor of Corporate and Higher\nEducation Finance at EBS Business School.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The challenges to leaders are indeed formidable, not least the\nemergence of inter-institutional ecosystems involving complex feedback\nmechanisms which make outcomes for participants difficult to predict and harder\nto manage. An important part of the issue, said Hommel, is being able to lead\nin a VUCA world \u2013 being confident enough to make sense of events and trends, to\nembrace change and to act even knowing that sometimes you will be wrong. In\nthis world, old certainties \u2013 indeed the idea of certainty itself \u2013 are\nsuspect. Far from being the answer, technology, with its emphasis on analytics\nand hard sciences, has lured managers away from Drucker\u2019s vision of management\nas a humanities-based liberal art. There is now a widespread feeling that as a\nresult management has lost its way, being indirectly or indirectly implicated\nin some of the most urgent problems the world faces \u2013 climate change,\ninequality, political instability \u2013 which can\u2019t be solved without business\ninvolvement, but not by merely applying traditional management paradigms . In\nshort, management is guilty of committing the cardinal Drucker sin of doing\nthings right that shouldn\u2019t be done at all \u2013 which is squarely a failure of\nleadership.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The collapse of previous leadership certainties is clearly demonstrated\nby the fate of the post-Jack-Welch generation at the famous leadership academy\nthat was GE. As INSEAD\u2019s Yves Doz pointed out, neither of the two unsuccessful\ncandidates for Jack Welch\u2019s job was a success elsewhere. By imposing the GE\nplaybook on it, Jim McNerney \u2018nearly killed\u2019 3M. The tenure of Robert Nardelli\nat Home Depot was similarly undistinguished. As for GE, the conglomerate last\nyear did the unthinkable by appointing its first leader from outside the\ncompany. The common error, said Doz, was an \u2018over-structured\u2019 approach to\nleadership, over-reliant on GE\u2019s well-grooved processes and systems. In today\u2019s\nunpredictable conditions, leaders at incumbent companies tend to be too linear,\neven over-rational. \u2018We have to resist the urge and instinct to plan. Sometimes\nthe right answers are questions\u2019, said Doz. Yet the opposite totally\nunstructured approach, as demonstrated by leaders at fast-growing Nokia, is not\na recipe for success either. Constantly surprised by their own success, Nokia\nmanagers had no playbook at all, simply replicating what had worked before,\nuntil it didn\u2019t. Leaders have to find their own way between the two extremes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How to do so depends on circumstances: leadership is to a large degree\nsituational. For Laurent Choain, Chief People Officer of professional services\ngroup Mazars, leaders are not born nor made so much as revealed<\/em> by opportunity. General de Gaulle would have remained a\nnot-very-successful army officer if his path hadn\u2019t crossed that of Hitler,\nChoain pointed out. The corollary is that there is an unknown quantity of good\nleaders out there who only lack the situation that would allow, or force, them\nto prove it. Conversely, there is no one size that fits all circumstances. At\nMazars, following the departure of an exceptionally powerful leader, Choain\ndecided it was impossible for a single person to fill the shoes of the outgoing\nCEO and appointed a leadership group of senior partners, which is how the\ncompany is run today. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But there is a problem here. If leadership can\u2019t be reduced to a set of\nstandard strategies or personal characteristics, and only emerges from context,\nhow can it be systematically prepared for? For business schools, which are\nfirst in line, this is both an obvious problem and an opportunity. The current\nmodel of \u2018rationing\u2019 leadership development through cost and strong selection\nis at odds with the demand for more and better leaders (let alone \u2018leadership\neverywhere\u2019, the theme of GPDF20), and plays into the old-fashioned vision of\nthe leader as a lone hero. Moreover, led by fashionable fintech, AI and big\ndata analytics, business schools may be becoming narrower in focus and more,\nnot less technology oriented. So, are they needed at all? \u2018Blow them up,\u2019\nsuggested Bernhard Kerres, a rare combination of opera singer, Silicon Valley\nentrepreneur and consultant. Leaders would be better off parking the idea of\ndoing an MBA and spending the money on a start-up, he argued. Forget about\nleaders, Kerres continued, what is needed now are \u2018nodes\u2019 \u2013 people embedded in\nmultifaceted networks, like players in a string quartet or jazz combo rather\nthan the conductor standing in front of an orchestra.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Others differed. Accepting the need for better delivery at scale, the\nreal challenge, said Martin Boehm, Dean of IE Business School, is making\nbusiness education more purposeful and better linked to professional needs.\nLeaders needed to \u2018speak tech\u2019 too, but more important shall be the development\nof cognitive skills enabling graduates to deal with complex problems,\nambiguity, and managing collaboration and creativity \u2013 things beyond the reach\nof AI. For Hommel, the future lies in learning ecosystems of which business\nschools would be only a part; their leaders would have to model the qualities\nthat other organisational leaders would also need, such as sense-making and the\nability to interpret the future on the basis of weak signals. Ivo Matser,\npresident of GISMA Business School, proposed that, in 10 years\u2019 time, business\nschools should be offering a unique personalised learning journey for each\nstudent. The second part of the leadership supply chain, opportunity, was less\ndiscussed. Some of it could be dealt with in the evolving learning ecosystem;\ncompanies also have a role to play. The subject could usefully be addressed in\nthe 2020 Drucker Forum.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ultimately, however, the discussion circled back to Drucker\u2019s foundational distinction between leadership and management. As both Julia Wang, president of the Peter F. Drucker Academy, and executive coach and creative thinker Michael Gelb insisted, whatever the circumstances, leadership in the sense of doing the right thing can only be grounded in individual balance and character. This requires in the first place managing yourself \u2013 understanding your strengths and building on them, recognising weaknesses and remedying bad habits \u2013 and secondly, articulating the end to which leadership is the means. That has to go beyond the purely commercial: \u2018what you want to be remembered for, what you want to become\u2019, in Wang\u2019s words; \u2018taking the lead in solving the world\u2019s problems\u2019, in Gelb\u2019s. Those ends can\u2019t be outsourced. They can only be located in human judgement in the light of the well-being of the social ecology as a whole \u2013 reasserting and revitalising Peter Drucker\u2019s lost art. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

About the Author:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Simon Caulkin<\/strong> is a UK business journalist and writer. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This article is one in the Drucker Forum \u201cshape the debate\u201d<\/strong> series relating to the 11th Global Peter Drucker Forum<\/a>, under the theme \u201cThe Power of Ecosystems\u201d, taking place on November 21-22, 2019 in Vienna, Austria #GPDF19 #ecosystems<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

#GPDFrapporteur <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s 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 [\u2026]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":2519,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":""},"categories":[272,237],"tags":[270,238,129],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.druckerforum.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2505"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.druckerforum.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.druckerforum.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.druckerforum.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.druckerforum.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2505"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/www.druckerforum.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2505\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4349,"href":"https:\/\/www.druckerforum.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2505\/revisions\/4349"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.druckerforum.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2519"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.druckerforum.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2505"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.druckerforum.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2505"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.druckerforum.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2505"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}