When I first read PD in the 1970s, I didn’t really get him. The volumes dropping on my desk – Post-Capitalist Society, The New Realities, or, bafflingly, Landmarks of Tomorrow – appeared to have little bearing on management, and some of his famous one-liners seemed to me both obvious and obscure.‘The purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer’. ‘Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.’ ‘Management and managers are the … constitutive organ of society’. What did these even mean?

I should have paid more attention to his titles. They are the clue to Drucker’s significance, and the reason why it is not an exaggeration to say that the first ‘Day of Drucker’ on 30 June is an event of historic importance. The day is not about paying homage to the ‘father of management’ – a title that like his sayings is both true and only a tiny part of the whole. It is about facing up to our unique and sometimes uncomfortable responsibilities in a time that is nearly as perilous as that in which Drucker grew up in 1930s Vienna – and informs everything he wrote.

A Day of Drucker 2021

This article is one in the “shape the debate” series relating to A Day of Drucker on June 30, 2021.

Re-reading Drucker today, the paradox hits you on the head with the force of a flying mallet. The reason Drucker stands apart from nearly all other management writers is that he wasn’t primarily interested in management.  ‘Management was neither my first nor has it been my foremost concern. I only became interested in it because of my work on community and society’, he wrote later. And counterintuitive as it seems, that is precisely why his view of management is so urgently relevant to now.

For Drucker, the reason management matters is so simple and fundamental it usually goes unnoticed. Management is a means to an end, not an end in itself. That end is a free and functioning society, which – as was evident to an enquiring young European starting his career under the shadow of totalitarianism – can’t exist in the absence of thriving independently-run organisations and institutions. They in turn depend on good management. The only alternative to bad management is a command economy (‘at least they make the trains run on time’). That is what he meant by management being ‘constitutive’: ‘Performing, responsible management is the alternative to tyranny and our only protection against it.’

Everything else follows from this. For Drucker, management is a moral profession, with a duty primum non nocere, first to do no harm. Companies are part of society and therefore have a direct stake in its health; too systemically important to be under the sway of any single stakeholder, they and their managers have a non-negotiable obligation to put the resources society allots them to productive and effective use. Profit is a test of their effectiveness – and, critically, the essential down payment on the cost of the future jobs and products they will provide.

On the other hand, although absolutely essential (and he fiercely criticised managers for failing to explain why this was so), profit is no more a company’s purpose than a human’s is to breathe. Already in the 1980s, Drucker was alarmed to see managers and capitalism being carried away by the blind pursuit of money and profit. He hated managers benefiting directly from laying people off. Capitalism could not be an end goal in itself: ‘Free enterprise cannot be justified as being good for business. It can only be justified as being good for society,’ he wrote in The Practice of Management, as early as 1954.

You don’t have to agree with everything Drucker said to see many further resonances with today. He would have recognised the super-spreading surveillance business model for what it is, the business equivalent of Covid and perhaps the clearest and most present threat to society. He’d have been contemptuous of assertions by ideologues that the warp-speed delivery of Covid vaccines was due to ‘greed’ and ‘capitalism’. On the contrary, he would have described it as a too-rare case of his ‘society of institutions’ working as it should, a joint effort by government, public and private sector united behind a single purpose – and as such a blueprint for much needed institutional innovation ahead.

Covid is an existential moment for management, amplifying existing challenges at the same time as it opens up a tantalising vision of a different future. The last half century has been fundamentally hostile to Drucker’s idea of management as a central organ of free society, privileging instead the ‘business of business of business is business’ model, based on the economists’ stunted axiom of human self interest. In 1962, Milton Friedman, one of the latter’s chief progenitors, wrote that ‘Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable’.

Well, the boot is now on the other foot. As the neo-liberal ‘Washington consensus’ gives way to what the FT after the recent G7 summit in the UK refers to as a more inclusive, resilient and planet-aware ‘Cornish consensus’, the alternative ideas ‘lying around’ are those of Peter Drucker. Whether they concern the entrepreneurial society, the institutional infrastructure or the management of individual organisations, they are a perfect fit for the job to be done. That is why the Day of Drucker is important – not as a cause for celebration but as a practical start to the managerial heavy lifting that will be needed to bring the ‘new realities’ and ‘post-capitalist society’ of Drucker’s titles into being. To misquote him only slightly, warm words, like plans, are useless ‘unless it all immediately degenerates into hard work’.

About the Author:
Simon Caulkin is senior editor for the Drucker Forum.

This article is one in the “shape the debate” series relating to A Day of Drucker on June 30, 2021.

Moderator:
Eduardo P. Braun Conference chair

Speakers:
James Li Senior VP, Huawei
Alex Adamopoulos CEO Emergn
Sunil Prashara President Project Management Institute
Gemma D’Auria Global leader, McKinsey Leadership Practice
Eric Cornuel President, EFMD
Yannick Fierling CEO, Haier Europe

The year 2020 has put us through a lot, but in doing so created settings for effective leaders to have real impact. Who has stepped up to the challenge and who has stumbled: What broad lessons in leadership can we take away from this annus horribilus?

After Gary Hamel’s ‘Woodstock of management’ the day before and the rousing welcome address of Salzburg president Helga Rabl-Stadler, the Opening Salvos session uwas just that: a sighting round. The question in the session’s title – is leadership rising to the occasion – was not directly addressed, but the assumption was clearly that it wasn’t. The six contributions were all riffs on how it could and should be done better, the practitioners’ practical agenda fitting into the wider tours d’horizon of the academic and advisory presentations.

Thus, laying out the context, McKinsey’s Gemma D’Auria described the global challenge of leadership as reshaping organisations set up along the management lines of the first industrial revolution to address the very different issues and circumstances of the second, all speeded up by Covid.

Drucker Forum 2020

This article is one in the “shape the debate” series relating to the fully digital 12th Global Peter Drucker Forum, under the theme “Leadership Everywhere” on October 28, 29 & 30, 2020.
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Leadership’s collective midlife crisis

The result was ‘a collective midlife leadership crisis’ in which everything about the firm – purpose, organisation and distinctiveness – was up for grabs. For leaders, the challenge was moving from a reactive to a creative mindset – pursuing discovery over certainty, partnership over authority and playing to positive-sum rather than zero-sum rules. As important as cognitive and problem-solving skills in this shift were the scarcer emotional and social ones. ‘Leading with intent, which means having a north star for yourself as well as your people, leading with love, because you can’t collaborate in networks without that, leading with mastery and curiosity,’ summed up D’Auria, who suggested that the most important factor of all for corporate survival was not strength or even intelligence, but Darwinian adaptability.

Sunil Prashara of the Project Management Institute agreed that the era of covid had starkly revealed the limitations of planning for the future. Rather than trying to anticipate every change and shock, leaders should focus on building “gymnastic organisations” that were agile and adaptive without sacrificing precision and control. Gymnastic leaders focus on outcomes not process, enabling them to embrace new ways of working to solve urgent problems, like instant construction of Nightingale hospitals and breakneck development of covid vaccines, for example. Key roles for leadership were driving innovation, empowering people, taking a stand on major issues such as climate change and working holistically to solve them.

An era of constrained leadership?

Eric Cornuel at EFMD blamed some of the leadership shortfall on ideology: how could leaders apply their full talents when they were artificially constrained by a shareholder-value model that favoured short-term profits over sustainability and social impact – a short-termism echoed by the electoral cycle in politics? The pandemic had intensified a ‘deep crisis of elite legitimacy’ which in the absence of political and corporate will could end up in societal upheaval, he warned. In this intellectual vacuum, behaving as the traditional detached observer could leave academia looking increasingly irrelevent. ‘We should stop being mute,’ he argued. ‘We should be catalysts and whistleblowers, change agents helping to reconcile management, technological development and society, so that we can contribute to a new deal and a new social paradigm.. there is no better moment for us to stand up and be relevant than today.’

From the point of view of a practical consultancy, Emergn’s Alex Adamopoulos reminded the audience of a few roadblocks barring the way to leadership’s brave new world. Many of them are familiar – and it’s striking, as he says, how little they change. They are also basic, like the tendency still to think of leadership pertaining only to executive and senior management. Likewise employee disengagement, overoptimistic estimates of the speed of cultural change, and the remoteness of management from the front line – so that ‘even when we talk about customer-centric or people-centric, are we really considering the needs of clients, or emphasizing points that are important to us?’

To combat these tendencies, Adamopoulos urged leaders to free up their organisations by organising for value propositions and value streams rather than budgets and functions, and to adopt the discovery and experimentation mindset also picked up on by McKinsey’s D’Auria. Nothing could be done without cultivating a deep sense of empowerment, which he described having both the sympathy and the empathy to understand what that really entails for both teams and customers.

Wanted: innovation and collaboration

The other two practitioner voices came from senior leaders from Chinese heavyweight corporates Huawei and Haier, who each underlined the importance of leaders in driving much-needed innovation and collaboration. Innovation, pointed out Huawei’s James Li, was key not just during the emergency – for example setting up 5G networks for two field hospitals in Wuhan in two days – but also in recovery, where better and faster connectivity will enable transport networks and businesses to open up more quickly. It was guided by the core value of ‘going where customers need you most’ in tough times – ‘helping our customers work through crisis is simply part of the job’. Global cooperation, meanwhile, was a no brainer. ‘In times like this we need to stick together. We need to be more open, more inclusive, more united. We are stronger together, and the more difficult the challenge the more leaders need to work as one to solve this global crisis.’

As for Haier’s Yannick Fierling, he pointed to the resilience of the company’s radically decentralised structure in responding to the crisis. ‘You shouldn’t be thinking about Haier as a big gigantic company but rather a forest of micro-enterprises all turned towards the end consumer’, he said. Haier’s structure and business model aim to capitalise on the internet’s effect of abolishing distance to get ever closer to the market – hence its concept of ‘zero distance to the customer’. ‘Imagine the advantage’ – shared incidentally with Hamel and Zanini’s empowered and decentralised exemplars – ‘of people with the steering wheels in their hands, able to serve the end-consumer on a daily basis without control from headquarters.’ Proof of the pudding: extravagant growth rates among Haier’s international subsidiaries even in crisis, in some cases touching 50 per cent.

The key is human agency

Like the other speakers, Fierling singled human agency as the key building block on which everything else rests. ‘The business model is entrepreneurship,’ Fierling declared. ‘As Drucker said, every person in a company should become their own CEO – and that’s what we’re living in this company every day’.

At the end of the session, the audience was invited to vote on the most pressing challenge for leadership in rising to the occasion: accelerating innovation, building a strong human-centred culture, defining purpose, fostering international stakeholder collaboration or enhancing leadership training. It was perhaps cheering that 45 per cent of respondents chose the building of a culture based on human values – even if the session left little doubt about the magnitude and difficulty of the transformation involved in doing so.

About the Author:
Simon Caulkin is senior editor for the Drucker Forum.

This article is one in the “shape the debate” series relating to the fully digital 12th Global Peter Drucker Forum, under the theme “Leadership Everywhere” on October 28, 29 & 30, 2020.
#DruckerForum

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 part of the issue, said Hommel, is being able to lead in a VUCA world – being confident enough to make sense of events and trends, to embrace change and to act even knowing that sometimes you will be wrong. In this world, old certainties – indeed the idea of certainty itself – are suspect. Far from being the answer, technology, with its emphasis on analytics and hard sciences, has lured managers away from Drucker’s vision of management as a humanities-based liberal art. There is now a widespread feeling that as a result management has lost its way, being indirectly or indirectly implicated in some of the most urgent problems the world faces – climate change, inequality, political instability – which can’t be solved without business involvement, but not by merely applying traditional management paradigms . In short, management is guilty of committing the cardinal Drucker sin of doing things right that shouldn’t be done at all – which is squarely a failure of leadership.

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, 2019 in Vienna, Austria.
#GPDF19 #ecosystems

The collapse of previous leadership certainties is clearly demonstrated by the fate of the post-Jack-Welch generation at the famous leadership academy that was GE. As INSEAD’s Yves Doz pointed out, neither of the two unsuccessful candidates for Jack Welch’s job was a success elsewhere. By imposing the GE playbook on it, Jim McNerney ‘nearly killed’ 3M. The tenure of Robert Nardelli at Home Depot was similarly undistinguished. As for GE, the conglomerate last year did the unthinkable by appointing its first leader from outside the company. The common error, said Doz, was an ‘over-structured’ approach to leadership, over-reliant on GE’s well-grooved processes and systems. In today’s unpredictable conditions, leaders at incumbent companies tend to be too linear, even over-rational. ‘We have to resist the urge and instinct to plan. Sometimes the right answers are questions’, said Doz. Yet the opposite totally unstructured approach, as demonstrated by leaders at fast-growing Nokia, is not a recipe for success either. Constantly surprised by their own success, Nokia managers had no playbook at all, simply replicating what had worked before, until it didn’t. Leaders have to find their own way between the two extremes.

How to do so depends on circumstances: leadership is to a large degree situational. For Laurent Choain, Chief People Officer of professional services group Mazars, leaders are not born nor made so much as revealed by opportunity. General de Gaulle would have remained a not-very-successful army officer if his path hadn’t crossed that of Hitler, Choain pointed out. The corollary is that there is an unknown quantity of good leaders out there who only lack the situation that would allow, or force, them to prove it. Conversely, there is no one size that fits all circumstances. At Mazars, following the departure of an exceptionally powerful leader, Choain decided it was impossible for a single person to fill the shoes of the outgoing CEO and appointed a leadership group of senior partners, which is how the company is run today.

But there is a problem here. If leadership can’t be reduced to a set of standard strategies or personal characteristics, and only emerges from context, how can it be systematically prepared for? For business schools, which are first in line, this is both an obvious problem and an opportunity. The current model of ‘rationing’ leadership development through cost and strong selection is at odds with the demand for more and better leaders (let alone ‘leadership everywhere’, the theme of GPDF20), and plays into the old-fashioned vision of the leader as a lone hero. Moreover, led by fashionable fintech, AI and big data analytics, business schools may be becoming narrower in focus and more, not less technology oriented. So, are they needed at all? ‘Blow them up,’ suggested Bernhard Kerres, a rare combination of opera singer, Silicon Valley entrepreneur and consultant. Leaders would be better off parking the idea of doing an MBA and spending the money on a start-up, he argued. Forget about leaders, Kerres continued, what is needed now are ‘nodes’ – people embedded in multifaceted networks, like players in a string quartet or jazz combo rather than the conductor standing in front of an orchestra.

Others differed. Accepting the need for better delivery at scale, the real challenge, said Martin Boehm, Dean of IE Business School, is making business education more purposeful and better linked to professional needs. Leaders needed to ‘speak tech’ too, but more important shall be the development of cognitive skills enabling graduates to deal with complex problems, ambiguity, and managing collaboration and creativity – things beyond the reach of AI. For Hommel, the future lies in learning ecosystems of which business schools would be only a part; their leaders would have to model the qualities that other organisational leaders would also need, such as sense-making and the ability to interpret the future on the basis of weak signals. Ivo Matser, president of GISMA Business School, proposed that, in 10 years’ time, business schools should be offering a unique personalised learning journey for each student. The second part of the leadership supply chain, opportunity, was less discussed. Some of it could be dealt with in the evolving learning ecosystem; companies also have a role to play. The subject could usefully be addressed in the 2020 Drucker Forum.

Ultimately, however, the discussion circled back to Drucker’s foundational distinction between leadership and management. As both Julia Wang, president of the Peter F. Drucker Academy, and executive coach and creative thinker Michael Gelb insisted, whatever the circumstances, leadership in the sense of doing the right thing can only be grounded in individual balance and character. This requires in the first place managing yourself – understanding your strengths and building on them, recognising weaknesses and remedying bad habits – and secondly, articulating the end to which leadership is the means. That has to go beyond the purely commercial: ‘what you want to be remembered for, what you want to become’, in Wang’s words; ‘taking the lead in solving the world’s problems’, in Gelb’s. Those ends can’t be outsourced. They can only be located in human judgement in the light of the well-being of the social ecology as a whole – reasserting and revitalising Peter Drucker’s lost art.

About the Author:

Simon Caulkin is a UK business journalist and writer.

This article is one in the Drucker Forum “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, 2019 in Vienna, Austria #GPDF19 #ecosystems

#GPDFrapporteur

Why do companies exist?

The question rears its head again with the recent Business Roundtable (BRT) re-statement of corporate purpose, although it used different terms. The accepted view, following Ronald Coase, is that companies exist because of market imperfections. Markets are the best way of organising economic activity. But in the face of uncertainty, complexity and unscrupulous human behaviour, entrepreneurs can find it cheaper and less risky to build a business inside an organisation than contract in the open market. This ‘market-failure view’ of the firm leads directly to the traditional structure of the company as hierarchical authority system to control costs and prevent opportunism on the one side, and to a preoccupation with efficiency on the other (what could we outsource more cheaply to the market?).

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, 2019 in Vienna, Austria.
#GPDF19 #ecosystems

A travesty of the real situation?

Yet viewed through an ecological and ecosystem lens, a startlingly different, more dynamic and creative configuration emerges.

As the late Sumantra Ghoshal emphasized, companies are not a second-best alternative to markets. They and markets are interdependent parts of the same larger system, each distinct and complementary. A well-functioning market ecology requires both ‘intensely competitive markets and healthy companies co-existing in a constant state of vigorous but creative tension,’ Ghoshal wrote. The role of companies is to innovate, creating new value from society’s resources, whereas markets commodify and compete most of that value away to the benefit of consumers. Companies are thereby compelled to begin the innovation cycle again. This is Schumpeter’s ‘gale of creative destruction’ that propels the economy forward. The repeating cycle of innovation and commoditization in the semiconductor industry illustrates the process in action.

As Ghoshal pointed out, this argues for a very different type of organisation, and means of managing it, than those emerging from the Coasian analysis. Companies should be managed not to ape the efficiency of markets by wringing the most out of existing resources, as now. Instead they should maximise their ‘company-ness’: their capacity for purposeful future-oriented inventiveness. This is something that markets can’t provide because they incapable of intention or the ability to strategize.

Ecosystems and purpose

Now factor in today’s burgeoning ecosystems. Ecosystems represent a historic evolutionary shift in the ecology of business which offers vast potential for new kinds of value creation. But making the most of it requires an equal evolutionary advance in thinking about the form and functioning of the organisations that animate those ecosystems. The first law of systems is that everything is connected to everything else. The second law, obvious when you think about it, is that you can’t optimize a system by optimizing the parts. As Charles Hampden-Turner put it: ‘Maximising anything is fatal to the balance of the whole system.’

Thriving in ecosystems (see David Hurst, Julia Culen and Vlatka Hlupic in this series), means that management has to move up a level. From value capture to value creation, from winner-takes-all to give and take, from controlling events to identifying emergence and patterns. And from narrow shareholder obsession to big-picture concern with the health of the ecosystem as a whole.

This doesn’t make companies easier to manage, but it does clear up the vexed issue of purpose. It is no longer possible to ignore an ecological principle we have pushed aside for too long. No individual firm can flourish in a wider ecosystem that is failing. Every company is responsible for its health. Companies exist to contribute their best to the ecosystem by doing what only companies can do. That’s what they are for.

About the Author:

Simon Caulkin is a UK business journalist and writer. He is senior editor for the Global Peter Drucker Forum

This article is one in the Drucker Forum “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, 2019 in Vienna, Austria #GPDF19 #ecosystems

The explosion didn’t go off in 2009 because an equally petrified left and right, despite rhetorical ferocity over marginal differences, united to assure their followers that despite the glaring flaws there was no alternative to the restoration of bankrupt ‘business as usual’, on both political and economic fronts. As in the 1930s (think Weimar Republic) it was a hopeless failure. ‘Quae non possunt non manent’  – things that can’t last, don’t. It’s the borrowed time of the previous consensus, based on the easy assumptions of social and economic liberalism, that has just come come to a noisy and vituperative end.

It’s been too glibly assumed that liberal social attitudes – to race, gender and sexual orientation, immigration, welfare, crime and punishment – which are now under such attack in the US and much of Europe, go hand in hand with democracy. Only up to a point. They are much more, perhaps only, sustainable in a healthy, balanced economy in which jobs, income and new resources funding some kind of social safety net, ease the pinch-points that aren’t caused by, but are blamed on, social liberalism. As we know to our cost, austerity is sooner or later death to tolerance and fellow feeling along with economic wellbeing, and best friends with resentment and anger over what’s felt to be lost, fear of the other and of what’s to come.

This is why real economic change is now both the priority and a possibility. As Paul Mason points out, ‘It is entirely possible to construct a humane pro-business version of capitalism without…austerity, inequality, privatisation, financial corruption, asset bubbles and technocratic hubris’ – provided we go beyond a glib determinism that sees the middle and working classes as victims of inevitable globalisation and technological advance, as if these were ineluctable forces of nature over which we have no agency. This is simply false.

It wasn’t abstract economic flows that caused the derivatives bubble that led to the Great Crash, but catastrophic management decisions, bent by unrealistic assumptions about human nature, about what companies are for, and how they should behave. In exactly the same way, it’s not globalisation itself that is (in part) responsible for stagnant wages and lack of good jobs, but what financialised, short-termist companies and managers have done with it. As former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis put it recently, globalisation in the shape of the international movement of goods, capital and people is one thing; globalisation as the ability of giant corporations to play hide-and-seek with international profits, arbitrage tax regimes and domicile, and lobby for international treaties allowing them to sue countries for actions that damage their profitability, is something that no one signed up to.

It’s no use economists vaunting globalisation and free trade as ‘goods’ in the abstract. They are only good if they are designed to be. Perhaps it’s that conditionality that J. M. Keynes, not noted as a narrow thinker, had in mind when he wrote in the 1930s: ‘I sympathise with those who would minimise, rather than those who would maximize economic entanglements among nations. Ideas, knowledge, science, hospitality, travel — these are things that of their nature should be international. But let goods be homespun wherever it is reasonable and conveniently possible, and above all, let finance be primarily national.’

Similar considerations apply to technology, perhaps even more so. The reason for pessimism over the current direction of technological travel does not lie in the nature of technology itself, nor in the belief that no other direction is possible. Precisely the contrary. It is that the world is experiencing the first great wave of technological advance to take place under a regime in which managers who make resource allocation decisions are enjoined, not to mention highly incentivised, to privilege investments that benefit shareholders (among them themselves), whatever the consequences for other stakeholders. This is why they favour low-risk efficiency gains over less certain but potentially much higher returns from more ambitious and expensive innovation (The capitalists’ dilemma). Consider in this context the ‘sharing’, or better, ‘gig economy’. If you thought it appeared by virgin birth out of the blue of cyberspace, think again. Following logically on from downsizing, outsourcing, offshoring and the end of career, task-based employment, or the end of the job, it is just the latest efficiency-driven, technology-aided manifestation of managers’ ongoing determination to bring market mechanisms into the company, in the (wrongly) presumed interest of shareholders.

Peter Drucker believed that corporations were far too important for the health of the wider society to be under the control of any one interest. He also believed that when institutions and beliefs outlive their founding assumptions, as they do, they become afflictions, threatening the whole of civil society with upheaval and unrest. Which is why innovation and entrepreneurship – ‘pragmatic rather than dogmatic, modest rather than grandiose’ – ‘are needed in society as much as in the economy, in public-service institutions as much as the economy’. No one can fail to see the relevance to the events of today. This year’s Global Peter Drucker Forum has as its subject ‘The Entrepreneurial Society’, its subtext the need for self-renewal drawing on the combined practical capabilities of state, civil and private sectors. Never has a major conference theme been so apt, or so urgent

About the author:

Simon Caulkin is a writer and editor who was The Observer’s management columnist for 16 years and also edited the UK monthly Management Today, and has contributed to the Economist, the Financial Times, amongst others, and is a Fellow of the think-tank ResPublica.

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 or right-wing infiltration (the film came out when the Cold War was in full swing), but technology – particularly digital technology, whose seductions make all too easy the draining away of humanity that the doctor observes in his patients.

To take just three examples:

• As the New York Times’ description of Amazon’s work practices made clear, new workplace technology makes possible an unprecedented degree of control over working (and sometimes private) life. But US costs of work-related stress put at 120,000 lives and $190bn extra medical costs annually argue that Amazon is not the only hard taskmaster. Firms offering apps for performance measurement, instant feedback and time tracking firms are the VC-backed start-ups du jour. In a society ‘where money trumps human well-being and where any price, maybe even lives, is paid for status and success’, in Jeff Pfeffer’s words, technology all too easily institutionalises dehumanisation and makes it normal.
• ‘A wealth of information creates poverty of attention,’ said Herbert Simon, long before today’s computer-fuelled data tsunami. To give of their best, humans need to focus, tackle one thing at a time, and reflect deeply. But space for ‘slow thinking’, in Daniel Kahneman’s term, has been systematically expunged from today’s high-pressure offices. As LBS’ Lynda Gratton points out: ‘We’ve designed work that takes away the only opportunity humans have to be different from machines. The very technology that makes creativity important is limiting it because of the way we’re choosing to make jobs work.’
• More and more of human lives are marketised and commodified on technology platforms. Homes and cars via Uber and Airbnb; personal and medical details, likes and preferences, are for sale via search and social media. The assault of advertising will become ‘more intense, focused, targeted, unyielding and galactically more boring’, predicts novelist Doug Coupland. In an image straight out of Invasion, he envisions a time when, just as most value of products is in their information content, humans too have become their data, the only difference being that instead of turning us into ‘pod’ clones, ‘your replicant meta-entity… will merely try to convince you to buy a piqué-knit polo shirt in tones flattering to your skin at Abercrombie & Fitch.’

In his 2009 book The Nature of Technology, complexity scientist Brian Arthur rejects notions of technology as a collection of eurekas and individual breakthroughs. He sees it as more like an ecology, evolving and adapting with the same ‘messy vitality’ as life itself. Technology, says Arthur, ‘builds itself organically from itself’ as initially separate branches and sub-branches feed on each other, combine and compete.

Yet the form a technology takes is unpredictable, being shaped by accident, history and human agency. One human agency is management, itself a technology in the broadest sense. In fact management is crucial, because its choices govern what technologies are invested in and the purposes they are used for – and thus who are winners and losers.

Few dispute that machine intelligence is the mother of all General Purpose Technologies, one that, as the Future of Life Institute puts it, gives ‘life the opportunity to flourish like never before… or self-destruct’. What no commentator has noticed, however, is another point of uniqueness. Digital is the first great wave of technological advance to be driven by a management ideology that incentivises managers to privilege investments that benefit one constituency only: shareholders, including those who make those decisions. In that ideology, it’s irrelevant who loses.

What a technology is used for is a choice. Combining the same digital with different management technology would yield different outcomes. It’s not hard to imagine peer-to-peer platforms devoted to medical or social ends, or an internet that by putting individuals in charge of their own data enables vendor relationship management rather than vice versa. As Tom Davenport argues, machine intelligence could – should – be used to augment humanity rather than replace it, with potential that neither could deliver on their own.

Is that likely under today’s incentives? Consider a quote from the founder of a food production start-up: ‘Our device isn’t meant to make employees more efficient. It’s meant to completely obviate them.’ Or this from another start-up entrepreneur: ‘It will not be possible [for top managers] to hide in the C-Suite for much longer. The same cost/benefit analyses performed by shareholders against [sic] line workers and office managers will soon be applied to executives and their generous salaries’.

At the insistence of the studio, Siegel left the ending of his film open – as ours is too, just. But unlike Invasion‘s spores from outer space, today’s agents of change – reductive industrial-age management and digital technology – and their dehumanising effects are real: ‘They’re already here! You’re next!’ We already know that in terms of sheer processing power the race against the machine is one that humans can’t win. So more than ever we – and managers in particular – need to understand what it means to be what Peter Drucker in Post-Capitalist Society calls the ‘educated person’ in the machine age: someone who lives in the digital present but inflects it by drawing on the accumulated great tradition of the past. That includes films like Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, which is thus a double tell-tale: so long as it still evokes a frisson, and we can recognise it as a warning – but only so long – we’ll know the fight to stay human is still there to be won. Or lost.

About the author:

Simon Caulkin is a writer and editor who was The Observer’s management columnist for 16 years and also edited the UK monthly Management Today, and has contributed to the Economist, the Financial Times, amongst others, and is a Fellow of the think-tank ResPublica.