Category: 10th Global Peter Drucker Forum

The new normal in lifelong learning
by Johan Roos

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It used to be that a university degree certified that you had enough knowledge to last a lifetime. An occasional book and on-the-job training would fill in the gaps and keep you up-to-date. Now the new normal requires continuous lifelong learning, including regular updating in your knowledge of things you may never have studied, particularly literacy of technology and the humanities. Fortunately, you can obtain all this knowledge in small chunks from a variety of providers — online, face-to-face, or blended learning formats. Here’s why these have become the new normal in lifelong learning. Technology literacy This model is required because technology is making the world increasing efficient, complex, and prone to sudden change. Whatever […]

Communityship beyond Leadership
by Henry Mintzberg

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Richard Straub, who runs the Drucker Forum, tweeted recently about my forthcoming book Bedtime Stories for Managers: “Good to know—maybe one or two preview chapters for the Drucker Forum at the end of the month?” So here is one, related to my contribution on “Leading Smarter Organizations.” Say organization and we see leadership. That’s why those charts are so ubiquitous. They show us who sits on top of whom, but not who talks with whom, when, and about what. Why are we so fixated on formal authority? Is there no more to organizing than bossing? Have a look at Figure 1 to see an Organization. Then look at Figure 2 to see a Re-organization. Figure 1: This is […]

Corporate governance: embracing a new mindset
by Peter Crow

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The limited liability company is a great construct; an efficient vehicle for commerce, through which to pursue an overall aim and to create value over an extended period. What’s more, greater economies of scale are attainable (over what a sole trader or entrepreneur could typically hope to achieve), mixed levels of ownership are possible and, for shareholders, liability is limited to the level of capital invested. Yet for all their benefits, companies are not without flaws—they are social constructions, after all. Even seemingly strong and enduring organisations are susceptible to missteps and failure at the hands of ineffective boards. The societal and economic consequences are not insignificant. When failures occur, blame is typically placed at […]

Trumpeters of Nothingness
by Kenneth Mikkelsen

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As a student I elected to study journalism. I was taught how to discover, craft and tell stories. I was motivated to understand what was behind the choices people made, to gain different perspectives, to hold the powerful to account and to spark critical discussions. Investigative journalists like Woodward and Bernstein were my inspiration. My first job after graduation, however, was with a PR agency. I never felt at peace there but it taught me some valuable lessons about life.  If you wish to work in the service of the highest bidder, to become a master of deception, quick fixes, short cuts and shady deals are all part of it. Each day, I observed how political, economic and corporate interests shaped […]

AI and Quantum Logic to rescue Humanity?
by Thomas Wienold

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The Good News We still have roughly 4 billion years before our sun turns into a red giant and scorches the earth, which will bring the end of life on earth. So why worry? The Not-So-Good News Life on earth may end much before the end of our sun, much sooner – in fact, a little too soon. Why? Because our brains are still rooted in ancient history and behaviors. Trained to survive, to win, to be the number one, to be the strongest, to be a hero. This was coded into our beings as it was necessary to win over wild animals – eat or be eaten! The Consequence There is no wild beast […]

The Engineer and The Gardener: the Central Tension in 21st Century Management
by David Hurst

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“Warm hearts allied with cool heads seek a middle way between the extremes of abstract theory and personal impulse” Stephen Toulmin, Return to Reason In Masters of Management (2011) Adrian Wooldridge (Bagehot columnist for The Economist and frequent Drucker Forum participant) 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 After declaring management theory “guilty” on all charges in various degrees, he identified the root problem as an “intellectual confusion at the heart of management theory; it has become… a battleground between two radically opposed philosophies. Management theorists usually belong to one […]

How a Gig Mindset Inside Organizations Will Shape Our Future
by Jane McConnell

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How does the gig mindset differ from a traditional approach to work? Is it just a question of nuance, of degree, or are there real, meaningful differences? What does it mean for people and their individual development? What impact does the gig mindset have on organizations? Does it build resilience, and trigger innovation? Does it create disorder and increase risk? The “gig mindset” research is based on eight behaviors (see figure below). The traditional mindset and the gig mindset are posed as opposites on the table, but in reality, people find themselves at different points along the spectrum, and individual people see themselves at multiple points on the spectrum depending on context and circumstances. The […]

Business Does Not Need the Humanities — But Humans Do
by Gianpiero Petriglieri

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Sometimes a simple story is all it takes to capture complex issues, or so it seems. Take this one. A few years ago, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg lost a game of Scrabble to a friend’s teenage daughter. “Before they played a second game, he wrote a simple computer program that would look up his letters in the dictionary so that he could choose from all possible words,” wrote New Yorker reporter Evan Osnos. As the girl told it to Osnos, “During the game in which I was playing the program, everyone around us was taking sides: Team Human and Team Machine.” The anecdote was too delicious to ignore, seeming to capture all we (think we) […]