On the first evening – a cocktail party for speakers and essay-winners – I introduced myself to a man standing alone. I noticed that he had a tiny gold medal pinned in his lapel. He was Dan Schechtman, winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, and a pioneer of Israel’s entrepreneurial revolution. We spent about ten minutes talking about entrepreneurship, as well as his efforts to teach physics to very young children (5 year-olds). He described how he teaches the concept of phase states (solid, liquid and gas) by having them pretend that they are atoms and then forming different relationships with each other, depending on the state they are in. Thus for solids the atoms (children) are packed together as tightly as possible but for liquids they have to form molecules (two hydrogen atoms for every oxygen atom, in the case of water), which allows them to move around in little clusters, and so on. Professor Schectman is clearly a thinker in multiple dimensions and I was delighted to find that he was a fan of Bucky Fuller’s work. According to the Nobel Committee his discovery in the structure of crystals “… revealed a new principle for packing of atoms and molecules…this led to a paradigm shift within chemistry.” (Thanks, Wikipedia).

Playing in the Open Patch

The conference itself consisted of a series of plenary sessions and panels, more of which in future blogs. For the moment the big news is that my entry for the Drucker Essay Challenge, which was runner-up in the manager/entrepreneur division has been posted: PRACTICAL WISDOM – 2012 Drucker Essay. The awards were given out at a gala dinner that we held at the wonderful Palais Ferstel, which is attached to the Café Central, one of the key meeting places for the intellectual elite of Vienna in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Apparently Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky were regulars and the Vienna Circle of logical positivists met there often.

As I expected, I was by far the oldest of the award winners. When my turn came, I asked to say a few words to the assembled company. I began: “I should explain my “mature” condition. A few weeks ago I heard a wonderful quote from the CEO of LEGO: ‘You don’t stop playing when you grow old – you grow old when you stop playing.’” At that a sort of collective sigh ran through the group. I continued: “For me Peter Drucker never stopped playing and he never grew old.  Thank you very much.”

It was a great party that followed the awards and the enthusiasm and excitement among the younger essay winners was intense. As we all danced in a circle to the music of the well-known Austrian rock band Papermoon, it struck me that that the passion of these young people was as palpable as that of Dan Schectman’s and that the zeal with which he had spoken of entrepreneurship and teaching concepts from physics to very young children was quite as intense as theirs. It was this passion that seemed to permeate the entire conference and I feel sure that Peter Drucker would have endorsed it whole-heartedly: Never stop playing!

AUTHOR:

I am a speaker, consultant and management educator, who helps managers and organizations learn from their past, understand the present and create their future. As a reflective practitioner, I have a unique niche in the field.  I spent twenty-five years working in corporations in several countries in a series of organizational “train wrecks” as the Western World began its radical transition from the industrial era to the age of knowledge and information.  I extracted from my experience some highly innovative ideas about leadership, the management of change and the dynamics of organizations that promote creativity and learning. I have spent another two decades honing my thinking as a consultant and teacher.  I communicate these ideas to audiences around the world in the form of creative presentations, in-depth seminars and management development programs. My articles have been published in leading business publications such as the Financial Times, Globe and Mail, Harvard Business Review, Strategy+Business, and several academic journals.

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This post was first published on http://www.davidkhurst.com/.

This is the gala dinner of the 4th Peter Drucker Forum, the Austrian- born writer, teacher and consultant, who was once tagged as “the Man who invented management.” He liked to call himself a “social ecologist” – i.e. someone who deals with the man-made social environment in which we operate.

For two days last week, an eclectic mix of close to three hundred corporate executive, entrepreneurs and prominent members of Academia from all over the world gathered at the heart of the Austrian capital to debate and reflect on the future of Capitalism – no less!

The Forum covered a wide array of topics from role of education to the emerging needs of social entrepreneurship.

Squarely rooted in what we would now tag as more than familiar emerging global trends:

• The unfolding worldwide value crisis
• A burning imperative to reconcile profit and social justice, or as mentioned by Georg Kraft-Kinz the Deputy CEO of Raiffeisenlandesbank Noe-Wien and Holding, ‘economic success needs to be combined with welfare.’’
• The raging talent war where… “Talent won” joked legal Peter Y. Solmssen – Member of the Managing Board and General Counsel of Siemens
• The need to re-kindle economic elasticity via fostering entrepreneurship, that by the way can be taught as asserted by Dan Shechtman Professor Technion Israel Institute of Technology, Department of Materials and 2011 Nobel prize laureate in Chemistry
• The impact of social media in traditional and emerging economies

The conference was however, thought provoking and innovative. It positioned itself as providing orientation in the jungle of ready made solutions and answers. Getting participants thinking in new ways about key issues was a key objective.

It was particularly evident in their challenge of the sacrosanct concept of shareholder value.

Shareholder value was for once not tagged as necessary evil that one would have to accept and live with, but as a concept in great need of tweaking and repackaging as Roger L. Martin, the dean of Rotman School of Management eloquently described.

The notion of “comprehensive profit” – profit that would harmoniously balance short-termism and sustainability was presented and debated, but not in a vacuum.

Different operating models – from customer owned companies, to entirely non-profit organization, from global partnership, to state-owned entities were presented to give a framework or contextualized the concept. The models worked as a large term of reference to explore, pick and choose, mix and match.

This desire to show potential paths for evolution was even clearer when the role of education was tackled and the need of constant learning to engrain in the wonderful world of corporate.

“Corporate acts as environment were not enough space is given to develop new mental maps of thinking” mentioned Thomas Sattelberger Vice-President Board of Trustees, European Foundation for Management Development (EFMD). the role of business schools of the future would be to act as laboratories of creations of ideas and minds.

“Opening closed systems, by pushing the exploration side to the traditional exploitation side that corporations cherish so much is the name of the new game, creating army of volunteers workers that feel thriving” he added.
Roger Martins Opposable mind meets purpose driven millennial- should be the battle cry of any corporate executive.

So what it is to bring back home?

The first thing is thinking differently, breaking free from some of the old models is the only way to create a paradigm shift. There is a community of kindred spirits in the Peter Drucker Forum- ready to step in and help. It is a question of taking the first step and reaching out.

The second thing, and it will appear counterintuitive, the community of kindred spirits that showed up in Vienna was largely European, educated, born and raised. It comes with predefined psyche and patterns.

As the executive of a prominent pharmaceutical company currently stationed in Brazil mentioned, “There is an emerging theme in Brazil- Capitalism is too important for us to leave it to the capitalists. Emerging countries want to create their model of capitalism and, actually of leadership that talk to them, makes sense for them.”
Europe and the US are not longer the reference. Asia is too fragile stuck between Lee Kwan Yew benevolent leadership and the new direction of China 18th Party directives Africa is still suffering from perception issues hard for westerners to truly overcome.

The world currently emerging is still hesitating between a muli-polar structure or a truly global and collaborative structure. What is it going to be and how can we influence it?

This is the challenge I want to pose to the 5th edition of the Peter Drucker Forum, let’s hear it from the BRIC, the next eleven, the women, the twenty something, and the African – they ARE the paradigm shift- let’s debate collaboration and technology they are the driving shaping forces of economies and leadership of tomorrow… Until 2013.

AUTHOR:

Marianne Abib-Pech has led a highly successful international career in finance. She left France, her home country, in her twenties to study Finance and Business organization at Herriot-Watt University in Edinburgh. She then worked for some of the most admired corporations of the past twenty years, from Arthur Andersen and Motorola to General Electric and finally Shell, as Global CFO of one of their downstream divisions. She was the only woman ever hired externally at this level of the finance organization in Shell.

Throughout her career, she has been exposed to the best leadership training possible and always demonstrated a keen interest in developing leaders within and outside her own teams.
Marianne is the Founder of Leaders! a global leadership consultancy and think tank operating in Europe and Asia. Leaders! Specifically focuses on leadership emergence, leadership transformation and cognitive diversity – gender, cultural and generational – to create business value.
Marianne is a regular columnist in The Huffington Post, The Independent and Global Corporate Venturing. The Financial Times Guide to Leadership is her first book.
She currently splits her time between Hong–Kong, London and Paris.

This post was first published on http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk.

Download the complete report.

AUTHOR: 

Yavnika Khanna is currently a project manager at Capgemini Consulting. Besides a bachelors degree in Business Studies from Delhi University and an MBA from KJ Somaiya Institute of Management and Research (SIMSR), she holds about 5 years of professional experience with various international consultancies.She is also the founder member and elected National Coordinator of Liberal Youth Forum- India (lyfindia.org), a youth organization promoting the ideas of liberty, market principles and self- governance. She is also one of the winners in managers/entrepreneurs category at Drucker Challenge 2012.

There is a hope that we can get out of the current economic crisis by embracing emerging management practices based on collaboration, autonomy and decentralization (which were all promoted by Peter Drucker), and by changing a mindset from the one that focuses on personal gratification to another that seeks to find a deeper meaning of work that is greater than any individual aspirations, and that is focused on making a positive difference for individuals, organisations and society.

In my own endeavour to make this world a better place, I have founded the Drucker Society London, one of the twenty Drucker Societies operating around the world. The aim of the Drucker Society London is to promote responsible management practices based on Peter Drucker’s ideas. One of our core activities is to teach young people self-management and entrepreneurial skills based on the Drucker’s Future Leaders Programme. I am delighted that we plan to teach workshops based on this Programme to WBS undergraduate students as a part of Employability module sometime next year.

If anyone would like to join the Drucker Society London and help us to make a difference for the future generations please contact me on hlupicv@wmin.ac.uk.
Professor Vlatka Hlupic

This post was first published on http://blog.business.westminster.ac.uk

We pondered the basic question that Peter Ducker often asked when he worked with managers: “What is needed?” And we took on the tougher question that Drucker used to close every conversation: “What are we going to do about it?”

What is needed?

No matter what their ages or backgrounds, participants agreed that the foremost challenge around the globe is youth unemployment.

Lynda Gratton  of the London School of Economics  arrived in Vienna from the World Economic Forum in Dubai, where experts  warned of daunting jobless numbers. “If you have youthful unemployment in Spain or Greece  rapidly coming north of 40 or 50 percent,” Gratton said, “there is unrest.”

We can prattle on about the spread of democracy in the world, but if we don’t address youth unemployment, democracy will retrench.   Indeed, we risk more autocracies and extremist governments to deal with the rising tide of disaffected teens and 20-somethings.

Paul Polman, CEO of Unilever, described witnessing a haunting scene upon returning to Newcastle, a city built on steel and coal:  “For the first time in my life, I saw second-generation unemployment.” He explained that this generation of young people had never seen their parents work. In fact, the only path out of misery they could see was having a baby – because that, at least, seemed a tangible possession.  Yet as young, jobless parents, they found themselves further mired in poverty.

“That galvanized me to do something more than have a brilliant career and make a lot of money,” Polman said. The challenge, he conceded, is enormous.

The angst of  young people was evident in the forum’s annual  student essay competition.   Of the 101 essays submitted, more than 90 focused on the lack of jobs.  Most also called on the youth themselves to invent jobs and start businesses, yet  lamented that such skills aren’t valued by their parents or taught in school.

All across the conference center, in a babble of English, German, Mandarin, Korean and other languages, participants grappled with the implications of youth unemployment.  The biggest issue the world faces now is not sustainable growth, the troubles with the euro, or indebted countries with no reserves. It is the rift between the youth and the rest of society, which stands to tear apart the social fabric.  And we have no solutions, not even realistic hypotheses for ending the unemployment of the next generation.

Ironically, this is the same issue Peter Drucker wrote about in his first book, The End of Economic Man –  the issue he credited with enabling Hitler’s  rise to power.

What are we going to do about it?

Creative thinkers and doers—from chief executive officers of multinationals to unknown masters of start-ups, from students to social enterprise champions—proposed solutions in Vienna. There was a resolute sense of “we” in every conversation. Again and again, they called for abandoning  tired traditions and charting new ways.

The large corporate CEO:  On his first day as Unilever’s CEO, Paul Polman stopped quarterly reporting to analysts.   That may sound counter-intuitive for one of the world’s leading publicly-held companies – one that is beholden to shareholders – but Polman  wanted to send a strong signal about priorities.

“I have better things to do with my time than report every 76 days about the weather impact, et cetera,” he said. Unilever has set as its goal doubling revenue and halving its carbon footprint over the next five years. The two are working together. Unilever has been able to modify its outdated, bulky pension system to invest money in youth training and cross-internships with not-for profits including Oxfam and  Forum for the Future, and so on.  Unilever also started an apprenticeship program based on the German model, offering a combination of jobs and training.

The result? Young people are learning from internships, apprenticeships, and training programs, positioning themselves to participate in the business world. Stockholders are having conversations about the long-term, for the company and for society. And consumers like what Unilever is doing and are buying more products.

Martin Curley, director of Intel Labs Europe, described the impact of opening Intel’s  innovation process to universities and other companies:  “When we let youth participate, they not only gain experience interacting with a corporate organization but also have an impact on results.” This more open innovation process with student input drove growth at what had been a flat company for years.

Social entrepreneurs. Bill Liao was one of many social entrepreneurs who spoke passionately about how people around the world are using well-crafted business practices as a force for good. For example, there’s a need for talented computer coders. One of Liao’s firm’s projects, named CoderDojo, is a movement that enlists volunteers to teach children to understand computers and code.

Since coding is a language skill, children who learn early become what Liao dubs “coder poets,”  who can get more impact from fewer lines of code. Society gains adept, top-notch coders, and the children gain a foundation for marketable skills. “Everything is free on every level,” Liao marveled.  “We don’t work for money, we work for impact, and it works!”  He’s not kidding.  Because CoderDojo is a movement without administrative fees, salaries, or costs of any kind, it doesn’t even have a bank account.

Academics. Nobel Laureate Dan Schectman of Technion Israel Institute called for sophisticated training to start early. He teaches kindergarten students physics:“This is the age they can learn. This is a language they understand and will grow with them.” He also teaches engineering students entrepreneurship—a class that is continually over-enrolled.  He talked about the need for entrepreneurs to recognize that ideas are not enough—they need to be managed.  He is helping kids be entrepreneurs and job creators.

Startups. Speakers talked of startups building businesses, all on the new model of cross-organization resources seeking high impact.   For example, Etventures is a place for large corporations to take their ideas to be nurtured and built up as innovations.  Qwalify is a site for individuals to find their strengths and be matched with organizations that need those skills – a matchmaker for employees and employers. Young thinkers are powering these developments, and every success grows the economy and the employment base.

Engaged citizens. Citizens, led by the young, are playing vital roles in creating   social change, such as fighting corruption.  They’re harnessing the transparency offered by the web and social media. John Quelch described a video of a man destroying his defective refrigerator, which has been seen 170 million times in China. He spoke of a fatal train derailment that could not be obfuscated by the authorities because images went viral on YouTube. Efforts like this motivate young people to participate in organizational life and sharpen practical skills.

Consultant Tammy Ericson described how, in these times, everything is visible to everyone, which brings to mind another Drucker quote:  “I just look out the window and see what is visible—but not yet seen.”

What is visible but not yet seen is the power of ordinary Chinese college students to thwart corruption. . . of young entrepreneurs crossing organizational boundaries and building bridges to what used to be unimaginable. . .  In short, organizations and citizens, young and old, are creating a new social contract, which will form the basis of Capitalism 2.0.

AUTHOR:

Elizabeth Haas Edersheim , author and consultant, is founder of NYCP – a management lab –  and architect of The Elements of Management Effectiveness, ThEME, available as an iPad app and in a customized version reflecting quotes and ideas from the Forum .  She worked with Peter Drucker in the last years of his life and authored The Definitive Drucker

I had come to Vienna to participate in the Fourth Global Peter Drucker Forum, which attracted hundreds of executives, scholars and students to contemplate what, in the aftermath of the global financial crisis and Great Recession, a better form of capitalism might look like. Much of the discussion on “Capitalism 2.0” centered, sensibly, on finding alternatives to maximizing shareholder value.

But other important threads also ran through the proceedings, including the way that information technology is reshaping all sorts of organizations. It was this particular theme that prompted me to flash on-and laugh about-a brief missive that Drucker sent to a friend in April 2005. “Pardon my ignorance,” he wrote, “but how do you get people to look at the Internet?”

The funny part is, as unfamiliar as the then-95-year-old was with exactly how folks maneuvered online, he had spent much of his life exploring and explaining a world that was becoming increasingly dominated by an unending stream of data and knowledge. “The impact of cheap, reliable, fast and universally available information will easily be as great as was the impact of electricity,” Drucker declared in his 1968 book The Age of Discontinuity.

Drucker may have been behind in grasping some of the details of technology, but he was incredibly far ahead in discerning the broader contours that most executives are just beginning to see, as evidenced by three insights from the forum:

1. Most companies are still stuck in a pre-knowledge-era mindset.

“When economists talk of ‘capital’ they rarely include ‘knowledge,’” Drucker wrote in his path-breaking 1959 book Landmarks of Tomorrow. “Yet this is the only real capital today.” As consultant and author Tammy Erickson made clear at the event, most organizations are, more than five decades later, still coming to terms with this reality.

“We are moving out of a century in which the key resource that distinguished one’s business was capital-‘those who had money made money,’” Erickson told the audience. “Today we live in a world in which the biggest challenge facing any company and every business leader is to mobilize intelligence.” That, she explained, is the way to offer the customized products and services that consumers now demand; respond quickly to outside changes “through insights gained from faint signals”; innovate; and “harness the smallest units of knowledge, creating value from bits that in the past would have been ignored or discarded.”

2. Getting information to flow seamlessly between parts of the organization, as well as between its walls and the outside universe, remains daunting.

“How do you prepare leaders to cooperate and coordinate across complex boundaries?” London Business School’s Lynda Gratton asked at the close of her presentation. She noted that while some companies, such as IBM and Infosys, have designed sophisticated platforms to enhance the ability of their people to collaborate easily and often, this continues to be a weak spot for many. In fact, the ability to transcend organizational boundaries is one of four risks (along with the successful application of open innovation, the effective use of social media and intergenerational cohesion) that Gratton’s research has shown corporate leaders are most concerned about these days.

Drucker worried about this, too. He called for executives to bring “the meaningful outside” into their organizations. Internally, meanwhile, “all the managers in a plant will have to know and understand the entire process, just as the destroyer commander had to know and understand the tactical command of the entire flotilla,” Drucker wrote in Managing for the Future, published in 1992. They will “have to think and act as team members, mindful of the performance of the whole. Above all, they will have to ask: ‘What do the people running the other modules need to know about the characteristics, the capacity, the plans and the performance of my unit? And what, in turn, do we in my module need to know about theirs?’”

3. Don’t underestimate what can be done when people have vital information in their hands.

“Whoever has the information has the power,” Drucker wrote in his 2002 book Managing in the Next Society. “Power is thus shifting to the customer.”

In the U.S., at least, Best Buy has become the poster child for this dramatic transformation. But to really comprehend how far-reaching its effects can be, we should all be looking toward China, where 530 million people are now connected to the Internet and half of those use social media every day.

John Quelch, of the China Europe International Business School, told Drucker forum attendees how one blogger last year put a dent in Siemens’s reputation after the company failed to respond adequately to complaints about refrigerators with a faulty door. The blogger, Luo Yonghao, and friends sledgehammered several of the products in front of the company’s offices in Beijing-all of it caught on video. Their efforts went viral, and Siemens wound up apologizing. At the same time, other Chinese have self-organized online to form purchasing groups with enough leverage to force down the price of, say, the new Toyota Yaris they each want to buy.

“In the absence of strong legal and consumer protection systems, social media protect the interests of ordinary people, facilitate competitive pricing through e-commerce and enable emerging as well as established brands to thrive,” Quelch remarked.

Whether this consumer power can stretch into citizen power is an open question. Drucker, though, wouldn’t have been surprised if it does. E-commerce is “profoundly changing economies, markets and industry structures,” he wrote in The Atlantic in 1999. “But the impact may be even greater on societies and politics and . . . on the way we see the world and ourselves in it.”

For hundreds of millions of Chinese, the information revolution may truly live up to its name.

AUTHOR:
Rick Wartzman is the executive director of the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University and a columnist for Forbes.com. He is the author of What Would Drucker Do Now? (which is a collection of his columns) and two books of narrative history: Obscene in the Extreme: The Burning and Banning of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and (with Mark Arax) The King of California: J.G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American History.

This post was first published on www.forbes.com.