Year: 2015

Staying Alive
by Simon Caulkin

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In Don Siegel’s 1956 film shocker Invasion of the Bodysnatchers a California doctor becomes convinced that his patients are being taken over by alien replicants. They look the same; they’re just strangely emotionally absent. As those around him morph into their affectless lookalikes, it’s the frantic doctor who seems insane. ‘Relax, don’t fight it,’ he’s advised – can’t he see that it’s easier, simpler – better – to live in a world without unruly emotions – all the messy downsides of humanity?   Invasion has been interpreted in different ways, which is the beauty of imaginative human creations. Viewed today, however, one reading suggests itself above any other: the threat to human-ness is not communist […]

Time to Clean the Management Lens
by Joseph Pistrui

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Management is a lens. It’s the best way yet invented to focus the organisation’s capital, human, and time resources toward the goals of the business. Many have observed that companies can have admirable goals; but, if poorly managed, success proves elusive.   Suppose the management lens was smeared, even opaque. In this case, management could easily misapply its resources. Or suppose the lens was a mirror looking only at the way resources had been deployed. In this case, management typically repeats decisions about how best to use its resources.   There are signs that this is very much the state of management today; and, with consumer and product cycles moving ever faster, the danger of […]

The Choice Ahead Regarding Digital Technology
by John Hagel

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We humans are a paradoxical species. On the one hand, we are uniquely endowed with the power of extraordinary imagination – the ability to see what could be, but has never been. On the other hand, as humans, we are imperfect, we have weaknesses and we make mistakes, lots of them. It is the ability of our imagination to triumph over our imperfections, weaknesses and mistakes that has driven human progress over the millennia.   Here’s another paradox: the rise and spread of industrial society was at one level a product of that powerful imagination and yet that very same society has been on a quest to limit and contain that imagination. Our industrial society […]

FINDING THE UNICORN: organizational change, persuasion and belief
by Lesley Crane

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One could be forgiven for thinking that managing change in an organization is a simple matter of persuasion. After all, we spend a great deal of time trying to get people to do or think things we want them to. The goal, conscious or not, is to induce a shift in the belief system of the recipient. Persuasion, then, is a form of making demands which, as Peter Drucker notes in his essay on Functioning Communications, is one of the fundamentals of communication. Fundamental it may be, simple it is not.   The implicit understanding here is that when we perform an everyday act of persuasion (e.g., I know more than you, so I must […]

Creating more winners than losers in the digital era
by Charles-Edouard Bouée

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When we try to define what a “digital organization” is, what first comes to mind are technological devices: employees toting laptops, permanently connected to a shared, real-time flow of information on virtual platforms, constantly communicating with customers or suppliers – people working from anywhere, with others they have never met in person.   Technological change isn’t just about technology: Insights from Mad Men   It is a fact: all major changes in the workplace happened through new technological devices. The American television series Mad Men illustrates some great examples. The show documents in an extremely precise way how office life evolved from the early 1960s through the mid-1970s. In season 2, a new device enters […]

Automation for the People
by Dan Pontefract

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Athens, Georgia, based restaurant Weaver D’s Delicious Fine Foods was once honored by an American Classics awards to recognize “good, down-home food” and “unmatched hospitality” – for its “spot-on fried chicken, sweet potato casserole, buttermilk cornbread, and … signature squash casserole.” G.P. Dexter Weaver, the legendary owner, wants its service to be known as “automatic for the people”, a term fellow Athens rock band R.E.M. used as an album title.   Wherever one looks researchers are predicting that “automatic for the people” is morphing into something we might coin “automation for the people”.   Researchers at the University of Oxford indicated 47 percent of employees in the U.S. are at risk of losing their jobs due to automation. In Australia, a recent report by the Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA) suggests 40 percent […]

Managing Oneself in the Digital Age: A Process of Continuity and Change
by Joe Maciariello

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The topic of the Drucker Forum is relevant to ongoing efforts to advance Drucker’s body of work. The body of work can be looked at using a Drucker lens for managing during periods of discontinuity.   Peter Drucker projected that “We face long years of profound changes.” (Management Challenges for the 21st Century, 1999.) During these periods one should identify things that change and things that exhibit continuity. That way we avoid the temptation of throwing everything old out during periods of radical change.   By the end of the 20th Century significant changes were already underway. These changes have caused me to restructure my work to try to stay ahead of change. I have […]

The human web and sustainability
by Philip Sheldrake

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The ultimate information technology challenge is the care and maintenance of a digital infrastructure that can help us rise up to so-called super wicked problems, collectively. Given the growing appreciation of the nature of complexity and the complexity of nature, we know we’re in the domain of systems thinking and sustainability – the health and resilience of living systems including our planet, our societies, and our organisations.   In pursuit of sustainability Sustainability requires healthy, distributed networks, with both diversity and individual agency, to facilitate the emergence of collective intelligence. It is these qualities our digital technologies must enable and encourage.   We must solve personal data and privacy, transform accessibility and digital inclusion, and […]