Tapping the human potential in ecosystems
by Stefan Stern

Friday Nov 22nd 2pm-3pm Zeremoniensaal, Hofburg, Vienna The corporation may be one ecosystem operating within a broader ecosystem. But at its heart remain the people who have to carry out the work that has to be done. This session of the Forum took time to consider the role of people and how they contribute to the wider ecosystem of business. In the chair was Andrew Hill of the Financial Times, and he was joined by Michele Zanini, managing director of Gary Hamel’s Management Lab; Gianpiero Petriglieri, associate professor of organisational behaviour at Insead; Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, author and CEO of the 20-first consultancy; and Bart Weetjens, a social entrepreneur and a Zen priest. Hill opened by recalling the words […]

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Networks and Platforms: The New Means of Value Creation
by Christian Sarkar

As the leading management conference in the world, the Global Peter Drucker Forum serves as a conduit of powerful ideas and insights for both business and society. In 2019, the conference theme was The Power of Ecosystems My observations are from the Plenary Session 2, Day 1, from the Global Peter Drucker Forum, 2019. Chaired by Adi Ignatius, Editor-in-chief, Harvard Business Review Group, the panel included: Vinton G. Cerf, VP and chief Internet evangelist, Google; Michael G. Jacobides, Professor, London Business School; Miriam Meckel, Founding publisher ada, Handelsblatt Media Group; Amy Webb, Founder, Future Today Institute; Professor Stern School; Zhang Ruimin, CEO and Chairman of the Board of Directors, Haier Group The Biggest Risk for […]

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People Centered Transformation: Turning Inspiration into Action
Tony O’Driscoll

At last year’s Global Peter Drucker Forum, attendees engaged in a pre-conference workshop to confront the inconvenient truth that the failure rate in implementing organization transformation initiatives is too high and too costly. The Project Management Institute (PMI) pegs the total cost of impotent transformation efforts at approximately $2 trillion per year – roughly equal to the GDP of Brazil. As things stand, organizations are squandering more than $3 million every minute on efforts that yield little-to-no change. Key questions In facing this stark reality, a number of key questions surfaced: What is causing the need for increased organization transformation? Why can’t we develop strategies that are more resilient to uncertainty? What traps do we […]

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Sparking small fires at the Drucker Forum Barcamp
by Isabella Mader

Not a classic panel, nor the speakers you’d expect at a conference like the Global Peter Drucker Forum. The motto: growth happens where there is access to opportunity. The format is targeted at younger-generation participants from two camps: the winners and finalists of the Peter Drucker Challenge, an essay contest for students and young entrepreneurs, and participants in the Talent Award program for corporate career talents nominated by their employers. The shortened ‘Barcamp’ format used within the Global Peter Drucker Forum sees pitches by participants, followed by an audience vote to select the most popular topics that will then be presented in a short talk. Ample discussion time is provided thereafter. To start off the […]

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“Managing Oneself” Revisited
by Julia Wang

In a networked world, opportunities for individuals to develop, create and grow are available everywhere. Whether they can successfully capture the opportunity or surf on the wave of the changes, depends heavily on the individual ability to manage oneself. At the 11th Global Drucker Forum on “The Power of Business Ecosystems” on November 21, 2019 in Vienna, one plenary discussion on the theme of “Managing Oneself” drew on Peter Drucker’s 1999 article of the same name to bring new perspectives on leadership, innovation, and organizational resilience and agility in the context of ecosystems today. Art Kleiner, Editor in Chief of PWC Strategy+Business, kicked off the discussion by revisiting Drucker’s original text. According to Drucker, managing […]

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Report on the Round Table ‘Peter F. Drucker and the Society of the Future’
by David Hurst

Panelists: Chair: Richard Brem, Senior Advisor, Peter Drucker Society of Europe, Peter Paschek, Management Consultant, Timo Meynhardt, Professor for Business Psychology and Leadership, HHL Leipzig Graduate School of Management, Verena Ringler, Curator, Erste Foundation Aaron Barcant, Independent Researcher, Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy The round table began with Richard Brem introducing the panelists and each of them summarizing why Peter Drucker’s work and vision mattered to them. Drucker’s vision Drucker always argued that one’s worldview mattered to one’s understanding of one’s role and contribution in society and one’s ability to manage oneself and others. American philosopher Thomas Sowell, describes a vision as a ‘pre-analytic, cognitive act’ that helps simplify an overwhelmingly complex reality. Think […]

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Preparing leaders for tomorrow: revisiting Drucker’s lost art of management
by Simon Caulkin

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’s 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 […]

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Understanding how digital ecosystems are created
by Omar Valdez-de-Leon

Throughout the modern industrial era, industries have generally been organised as linear value chains, producing vertically integrated organisation, organised to control the entire value chain and achieve economies of scale, to create a competitive advantage. As digital technologies gain adoption, they enable new ways of organising how value is created. This transition to digital ecosystems is challenging. There is still limited knowledge of how these ecosystems are created, how they work and how organisations can best participate in such ecosystems. Drucker Forum 2019 This article is one in the “shape the debate” series relating to the 11th Global Peter Drucker Forum, under the theme “The Power of Ecosystems” taking place on November 21 & 22, […]

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