The Great Transformation of the Organization Needs the How
by Dan Pontefract

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This blog was originaly published on the HuffPost blog.   Billed as “The Great Transformation”, its work was cut out for itself from the moment you could register online. A conference paying homage to the brilliance of Peter Drucker has now become an annual calendar fixture not to be missed. The 6th iteration of the Global Peter Drucker Forum — recently held in Vienna, naturally — has arguably become the TED or Davos of all leadership conferences. But could we shift into an era of “managing our way to prosperity,” as the conference sub-title suggested?   Could we achieve “The Great Transformation”?   Richard Straub, the Forum’s chief architect, asked a rhetorical question in his […]

Post-Rational Management? Reflections on the Global Drucker Forum 2014
by David Hurst

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The 6th Global Drucker Forum ended on November 14 with a series of comments and calls to action from the major speakers involved. The last of these was HBS professor Clay Christensen, who called for more cooperation and harmonizing of language among management experts. He illustrated the kind of cooperation he was talking about with a story about Florida governor Jeb Bush and how he had shared slides from a presentation on the topic of child-centred education and the reform of the American education system. Forbes columnist Steve Denning quoted Christensen’s story in full and suggested that this is the way the management field should be headed. I didn’t agree and responded to his column. […]

Human Essence as a Key to Prosperity. Part I of II.
by Ellina Watanabe

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It has been 60 years since Peter Drucker pointed out to the management world an importance of inner human world and its impact on prosperous organization functioning. Today, managers are finally embracing his words and are starting to “lead not only through knowledge, competence and skill but through vision, courage, responsibility, and integrity.” However, in order to fully reap the benefits of this ethos, it is important to approach it holistically, as Peter Drucker would and did.   Human essence, as I shall refer to the question of what makes us who we are, is often and conveniently diminished to human character, aptitudes, and virtues. Largely speaking, to intellect, knowledge, and reason. If managers adopt […]

Affordable Government- A Theory Or Just One Click Away?
by Jørn B. Andersen

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Author Jørn B. Andersen, European Director, Clareo and Advisory Board Member Kellogg Innovation Network   The theory of the firm was one of Peter Drucker’s great insights about how to analyse and understand why once great companies and organisations decline or develop themselves into oblivion. The central challenge for all organisations including government is ’What to do’. The root cause of every organization’s crisis is not necessarily that things are done poorly. The problem is that things done become fruitless. The reason for this is that the assumptions upon which the organisation has been built and run things no longer fit reality. Drucker’s point seems very relevant in regard to the present day’s role of […]

THE PARADOX OF OUR FAITH IN HUMANISM
by Andrew Keen

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“Every few hundred years throughout Western history, a sharp transformation has occurred”, Peter Drucker wrote (http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/10/what-peter-drucker-knew-about-2020/) in 1992. Today’s great transformation is being driven by digital technology. We are on the verge of a new epoch of smart computers that MIT’s Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolffsen describe as the “Second Machine Age”. Drucker himself imagined this revolution as “the shift to a knowledge society.” But it’s actually an information technology revolution – the artificially intelligent new world of the Internet of Things, self-driving cars and IBM’s Watson.   So how does this digital revolution change our lives? What does it mean for us as managers, workers and, above all, as human beings?   Many believe […]