Should you say “thank you” to a robot? This is not a trick question, or a philosophical one. I am interested in the practicalities.

A few weeks ago I made the mistake of clicking twice on a website button while trying to buy something. I was about to be charged twice for something that I meant to purchase only once.

With some apprehension, I picked up my phone and opened up the app for my bank account. “How can I help you today?”, the app asked, after I had pressed the “help” button.

Drucker Forum 2021

This article is one in the “shape the debate” series relating to the 13th Global Peter Drucker Forum, under the theme “The Human Imperative” on November 10 + 17 (digital) and 18 + 19 (in person), 2021.
#DruckerForum

I was being invited to start a conversation with an app, a robot or, as we might also call it, artificial intelligence. This felt like a new experience to me, although it is of course possible that, without realising it, I had already been engaging with AI in different settings for some time.

But now there was to be a live dialogue. If I had been an anthropologist, I might have asked myself how I should launch into this conversation. As a speaker of a couple of foreign languages, I appreciated that it would be wise to try to keep my statements as simple and straightforward as possible.

This approach worked. After a few exchanges the app duly cancelled my phantom purchase, and honour (and cash) was maintained.

“Thank you,” I typed.

Why did I do this? Why thank a robot?

I suppose I felt a human need to express gratitude, to be courteous, even while realising that the machine I was speaking to had no such human feelings at all. I had gone through the looking glass (or at least through my smart phone’s screen) and embraced the world of AI. I loved my new robot helper.

This is not the usual account which some people offer about their experience of dealing with new technology. (And yes, I have been known to shout abuse at unco-operative supermarket “self-checkout” machines.) Horror stories attract more attention, and fears about job losses make for arresting headlines. But the more positive truth about technology could be that inventive and adaptive human beings will find ways of deploying new machinery and software while yet finding other things for human beings to do. As far as “creative destruction” is concerned we should not over-emphasise the second word at the expense of the first.

The Covid crisis has confirmed how much human sensitivity and skill is required in the caring professions, for example, qualities that even the most sophisticated robot still struggles to emulate. Homo sapiens and AI may both flourish if there is complementarity rather than competition between them – augmentation rather than simply automation, as Tom Davenport and Julia Kirby put it in their book Only Humans Need Apply: winners and losers in the age of smart machines.

Of course, technology will continue to advance, in ways that many of us cannot yet imagine. Drucker may have been correct, in 1967, when he famously declared that “the computer is a moron”, but it can no longer be maintained as a criticism. (“Hier irrt Drucker…!”)

“The human imperative”, however, also remains, as the title of this year’s Drucker forum indicates. And in order to “navigate uncertainty in the digital age” we will need the best of what both humanity and technology have to offer.

Recently I had another encounter as an anxious consumer with a problem to solve. My late father’s final electricity bill needed to be settled. I rang the energy company concerned, fearing the worst (not my account, I was not the registered payer, all the usual issues).

But instead the very human human being who took the call was both spontaneously sympathetic in an unrobotic way, and then also efficient. It was a thoroughly satisfying (and human) conversation.

“Thank you,” I said as we completed our exchange. It seemed like the right thing to do.

About the Author:

Stefan Stern is the author (with Prof Cary Cooper) of “Myths of Management: what people get wrong about being the boss” , and also of “How To Be A Better Leader”. He is Visiting Professor at Bayes Business School, City, University of London, and a former Financial Times columnist

This article is one in the “shape the debate” series relating to the 13th Global Peter Drucker Forum, under the theme “The Human Imperative” on November 10 + 17 (digital) and 18 + 19 (in person), 2021.
#DruckerForum

Moderator:
Alexandra Borchardt, journalist and professor of journalism at Berlin and Oxford

Speakers:
Megan Reitz, professor of leadership and dialogue, Hult Ashridge Executive Education

Gianpiero Petriglieri, associate professor of organisational behaviour, Insead

Mathis Bitton, student of philosophy and political theory, Yale University

Rahaf Harfoush, digital anthropologist

It may not be true that the 19^th century French politician, Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin, once uttered the words: “Eh! Je suis leur chef, il faut que je les suive!” [“I am their leader, I must follow them!”] But the line is quoted often to this day. It evokes a chaotic world in which leaders have lost much of their authority, and feel intimidated by the uncontrollable power of the crowd.

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.
#DruckerForum

Ledru-Rollin was active more than 150 years ago. But perhaps he would recognise a similar sense of powerlessness felt – privately – by many leaders today. The theme of this plenary session at the 12^th Global Drucker Forum was precisely this: how to lead when activists and rebels are knocking, and battering, at the door.

The context for the discussion was set out clearly by moderator Alexandra Borchardt, journalist and academic. In an era of activism citizens want to participate and voice grievances, she said. They have raised expectations about what is possible, and a certain impatience for change. New technology gives everyone a platform from which to speak and spread ideas. And the commercial logic of algorithm-driven platforms favours extreme sentiment over moderate and nuanced ones.

This is the new world of expectation and amplification which confronts leaders, she added.

The first speaker, Megan Reitz of Hult Ashridge, observed that activism can be in the eye of the beholder. What may feel like rebellion to a leadership team might simply be the forceful expression of a point of view from employees. Power relationships, of course, sit at the heart of this tension.

Reitz talked of “conversational habits” – what we do and don’t discuss within organisations, perhaps owing to the differences in status and authority held by colleagues. Leaders may inhabit an “optimism bubble”, she cautioned, and have a certain blindness to the advantages they enjoy.

Leadership teams could respond to employee activism in a number of ways, she noted, ranging from outright denial (silence and suppression) to “facadism” (the pretence of engagement), defensive engagement, dialogic engagement, and active encouragement.

Lastly, she asked whether leaders could begin to see themselves as activists. How would an activist leader behave? This could stimulate interesting (if challenging) conversations about power. Perhaps activism could breed future leaders, Ms Borchardt added.

The second speaker, Insead’s Gianpiero Petriglieri, a Drucker Forum veteran, declared that managers had been outed as the politicians that they were all along – it was just that many people couldn’t see it.

Business activity is central to sustaining the fabric of society, Petriglieri said. So when a chief executive engages on a social issue it can be powerful. And people’s expectations for what business can do changes also.

Where previously future leaders went into the church or the military, Petriglieri said, now they go to business schools. Education remains central to the development of leaders. And at its best business school education can further both economic advance and the pursuit of humanistic goals. Some managers might claim that they are simply interested in business and that they leave politics to others, but that is self-deception; in fact, it is a kind of political statement in itself.

Activists give voice to the disenfranchised, so any leadership which considers itself “activist” needs to take account of this, Prof Petriglieri said. And managers need both to hold a point of view on how the business should operate, while also hosting disagreement and debate internally. Managers are the hosts of that tension and that dialogue.

Mathis Bitton, a composed post-graduate student of philosophy and political theory, pointed out that activism was nothing new. His parents’ generation, the “soixante-huitards” or class of May 1968, were no strangers to protest.

Ordinarily, corporate structures are not appropriate or suitable for truly democratic conversations, Bitton said. Businesses have not by and large been agents of social change. Business leaders are going to have to engage with liberal arts, the humanities, if they are to adopt a leadership role in society (something Peter Drucker well understood). They have to pursue a collective project, and engage with culture in a meaningful way. Tech firms have a particular responsibility, he said, as they affect how we see the world. They are not merely passive aggregators of information.

The last speaker, Rahaf Harfoush, a digital anthropologist and lecturer at Sciences Po in Paris, observed that a big promise has been made to millennial employees in particular: that their jobs could become delivery mechanisms to achieve lofty goals. But this can backfire. Employees at Google and Facebook, for example, may be shocked at what their organisation might do in practice. The idealistic, hyperbolical claims of WeWork in its marketing material crumbled to nothing.

“Hashtag activism” may feel meaningful, Harfoush said, but it doesn’t mean that you are really achieving anything. “It feels like participation, but it isn’t,” she said.

And as consumers we are complicit if we don’t change our own behaviour, for example by uninstalling apps. If we don’t insist on seeing specific data and evidence from companies that they are changing then protest will be ineffective, she said. Will recruitment, retention and promotion data shift in the wake of the Black Lives Matter campaign?

In conclusion, leadership and leaders will continue to be scrutinised closely. “We learn at work, and managers are educators,” Petriglieri offered. “Managers should ask themselves: what is the curriculum I am teaching when I show up at work?”

And “mindfulness”, or mental equilibrium, might not be the right goal for leaders, he added. “Let’s normalise friction,” he said. “For artists, friction is creative, they live with the torment of friction. The powerful should be tormented,” he added, “otherwise they become tormentors.”

About the Author:

Stefan Stern is the author (with Prof Cary Cooper) of “Myths of Management: what people get wrong about being the boss” , and also of “How To Be A Better Leader”. He is Visiting Professor at Cass Business School, City, University of London, and a former Financial Times columnist

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

In an “always on”, digital age, the deadline – it so often seems – is now. Churchill famously called for “action this day”. Today’s demand is for “action this minute”. Why have you not replied to my email? Have you seen this tweet? What’s been happening to the S&P 500 in the last few minutes, or seconds?

For many crisis management has become a default setting, and the short term has got even shorter. But paradoxically, this is precisely how to bring the next crisis closer.

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.
#DruckerForum

In the ongoing Covid-19 crisis, different leaders have adopted their own approach to tackling this challenge. Urgent action has been required. But the “false urgency” – proud boasts, unlikely claims, theatrical pronouncements – chosen by some leaders has proven confusing and counterproductive. Others, though, have displayed a more sustained and systematic approach. They have taken decisive action but also measured their results, altered their response according to the data and focused on long term solutions.

These leaders have displayed what Prof John Kotter has called “urgent patience”. This too sounds paradoxical, but Kotter defines it precisely: “It means acting each day with a sense of urgency but having a realistic view of time. It means recognising that five years may be needed to attain important and ambitious goals, and yet coming to work each day committed to finding every opportunity to make progress toward those goals.”

In business, urgent patience provides an antidote to the unthinking pursuit of “maximising shareholder value”, a false god which can also encourage ultra short-term behaviour and ultimately value-destroying choices. Leaders should teach their shareholders to be patient. Real and lasting value will not usually be created quickly. And the idea of sustainable growth implies an acknowledgement that rushing to generate large profits can end in failure.

In the past year there has been some excitement that the Business Roundtable in the US, as well as some leading voices at the World Economic Forum in Davos, have embraced the concept of stakeholders, in contrast to a more narrow focus on shareholders. They reminded me of Monsieur Jourdain, Molière’s “Bourgeois Gentilhomme”, who learns to his delight that he has been speaking in prose all his life. (Will Hutton’s “The State We’re In”, which promoted a stakeholder approach to business, was first published in 1995.)

But let us embrace even a belated conversion, if that is what it is, to a more balanced, urgent yet patient ethos in the matter of leading businesses. Urgent patience can also help us in the goal to promote “leadership everywhere”. Because it is the support and approval of our peers at work that can cement lasting improvements and competitive advantage. Particularly in the time of Covid, we want our workforces to feel the urgency of the moment, while displaying the patience that is needed to achieve wider and deeper goals in the longer term. We must make haste slowly – or “festina lente”, as the Romans used to say.

About the Author:
Stefan Stern is the author (with Prof Cary Cooper) of “Myths of Management: what people get wrong about being the boss” , and also of “How To Be A Better Leader”. He is Visiting Professor at Cass Business School, City, University of London, and a former Financial Times columnist

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

Friday Nov 22^nd 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 of the English writer and art historian John Ruskin, who identified three requirements for people to be happy in their work: they should be fit to do it, there should not be too much of it, and that people should have a sense of success in it. This neatly introduced the contributions from the panel, all of which, in their different ways, considered how humans react with the systems they find themselves in.

Incremental change is no longer enough

Zanini asserted confidently that the bureaucratic model of the organisation is no longer fit for purpose – too slow and inadequate to the needs of today. A lasting shift in management models requires radical change.

To get beyond slow, incremental change (which can be sabotaged) change has to be ‘syndicated’ – spread through the organisation. At the Management Lab this is called a ‘management hackathon’.

At one large consumer goods organisation which worked with the M-Lab, 4,000 employees were asked to reimagine the organisation’s management model, working on a dedicated collaborative platform. People felt they could change the system. The advantage of this approach is that, while 50 people working remotely on a change project can be blocked, thousands working in real time online (and visibly) are harder to stop. This is about ‘leveraging the wisdom of the crowd,’ he said.

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

Work: an existential moment

What was happening to our experience of work? Petriglieri asked. Change today is freeing us up, potentially, but also freaking us out, he said. Existential questions arise in this context: will we survive, will we matter, will we be in charge?

We have poor management tools, in our theory and practice, to deal with these questions, he noted. We are better at instrumental questions (‘are we productive?’) than existential ones. Yet this is an existential moment.

Three hundred years ago what it meant to be human was to belong. The logic was tribal. Later we defined ourselves in terms of what we did, what we contributed. And there were two basic psychological needs which underpin this: the need to belong and the need to be free. We need to have some agency. Belonging and agency are the two pillars of humanity. When we dehumanise others, we either tell them that they don’t belong or we restrict their choices.

In this digital age people are asking, about this emerging world of work: will we be able to make friends? How free will my choices really be? Who are we becoming and with whom?

We need a different metaphor for work and leadership, Petriglieri suggested. We’ve had the military metaphor (the general), the saint, the entrepreneur…now we need to consider the metaphor of the artist.

Artists are free and cultural, personal but working for others, marketable but adding beauty…we need to stop the tyranny of thinking that says if we are preoccupied with becoming and meaning it means we are not practical, Petrigieri said. He concluded: There is nothing as human as a good story. We don’t need another theory of management. We need a different story of management if we are to figure out what it means to be human in ecosystems.

Companies need to become gender-bilingual

For Wittenberg-Cox, women were the ‘canary in the coal mine’, choosing to have fewer children. But this leads to the problems of the ageing society. Designed and organised for men by men, companies have yet to adapt to the arrival of women in the workplace – women have been allowed in but only as long as they become men (or at least display a close resemblance to the dominant group).

Women will change the organisation, but only if they are allowed in as women, Wittenberg-Cox argued. Companies need to become gender bilingual, not gender blind. They are not the meritocracies they think they are. Where women are excluded, the ecosystem is ‘set up to fail’. ‘The Drucker Forum is, at least, one of the most gender balanced conferences I have seen,’ she added.

Weetjens showed a film of his organisation, Apopo, at work. Apopo trains rats to locate land mines, which can then be safely destroyed. (This represents quite a change for him – formerly he had worked as a product designer, before becoming a Zen monk.) ‘We work on human potential and rodent potential!’, he commented.

What do our structures do and for whom?

In the discussion that followed the initial presentations panelists looked more closely into what a healthy and changing ecosystem at work might look like.

Petriglieri observed that ‘you can have too much control but also too much freedom’. Organisations should be neither stifling nor neglectful. Today’s level of control now is ‘FW Taylor plus an algorithm’, he said.

A question to ask is: what do our structures do and for whom? And: ‘does our work allow us to make work that resembles us, and make friends who do not? If not we are being dehumanised,’ he said.

Wittenberg-Cox noted: ‘Feminism is a movement against domination.’ And Zanini observed that, in his opinion, the best organisations feel like a community or a family, in which you can set your own path. Families are not always unproblematic, however. And parenting is a risky metaphor, according to the former psychotherapist Petriglieri.

This was a stimulating and wide-ranging panel which in just one hour raised all sorts of questions worthy of further enquiry. It certainly added depth and variety to the rich ecosystem that is the Drucker Forum.

About the Author:

About the Author:

Stefan Stern is the co-author (with Prof Cary Cooper) of “Myths of Management – what people get wrong about being the boss” (Kogan Page 2017), and “How To Be A Better Leader” (Bluebird 2019)

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

What should a business leader’s main goal be: keeping an unrelenting focus on the performance of the business (that is to say an internal priority), or looking outwards, maintaining relationships and performing an ambassadorial role (an external priority)?

The easy answer would be to say “both”. But in the past few decades, during which the belief that “maximising shareholder value” should be the priority for chief executives, the external world has been a secondary consideration. Business leaders have kept their heads down, sweated the assets, and looked to deliver some market-pleasing numbers every 13 weeks.

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

This approach has generated considerable wealth, for some. But wages have remained flat for many people in the developed world, while some jobs have become much more precarious. This has provoked a reaction – the spread of populism and a revolt on both the left and right which has got business leaders and mainstream politicians worried.

As a report entitled “The Age of Giants” published by The Economist last year stated: “America’s economy has become a capitalist dystopia, a system of extraction by entrenched giants. Europe shows signs of the same sickness. Growing protectionism and increased digitisation may make things worse.”

In this context the recent statement by the Business Roundtable in the US has attracted considerable attention. Almost 200 leading CEOs committed themselves to working for all their companies’ stakeholders, rejecting the notion of “shareholder primacy”.

This has been regarded by some as a dramatic development. In truth it should not be so startling to hear CEOs committing to “delivering value to our customers” or “compensating [employees] fairly” (not “paying them more”, we should note).

Scepticism aside, it is certainly refreshing to hear credible and powerful figures reject the failed concept of “maximising shareholder value”. As David Ignatius wrote in the Washington Post, “Corporate America fears the system is failing.” Ray Dalio, of the hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, has said so explicitly: “I’m a capitalist, and even I think capitalism is broken.”

What the Business Roundtable is conceding is that business leaders do indeed have to concern themselves with the wider commercial ecosystem in which they operate. Business cannot succeed in a world that is failing.

And for those business leaders who are nervous about speaking up or engaging beyond the narrow confines of their quarterly financial reports, research carried out by Prof Andrew Crane (University of Bath) and colleagues shows that there is a distinct upside for businesses that are prepared to engage. Job applicants are over 20% more likely to want to work for a company where the CEO takes a “humanistic stance” on a political issue unrelated to their business, they found.

Businesses operate in an ecosystem whether they like it or not. It is not just shareholders who are watching. The rest of the world is, too.

A recent report from the British charity Blueprint for Better Business put it well: “One way of characterising the global shift so urgently needed now is to move from an economic system optimised for growth and profit to one optimised for human well-being and a sustainable ecosystem.”

About the Author:

Stefan Stern is the co-author (with Prof Cary Cooper) of “Myths of Management – what people get wrong about being the boss” (Kogan Page 2017), and “How To Be A Better Leader” (Bluebird 2019)

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

Management, Peter Drucker famously said, is a liberal art. It may be informed by data and enhanced by technology. But it remains an art, not a science, and one practised by people, not machines. Do you want to be managed by an algorithm or a “platform”? Me neither.

But, you may object, this is sentimental and out of date. Computer code already influences our lives in all sorts of unseen ways, nudging us into purchasing decisions and co-ordinating our customer experiences. Apps make things happen. They connect passengers with available taxi drivers, or instruct delivery drivers and couriers to bring goods to our offices or our homes. Sophisticated and productive factories and “fulfillment centres” operate with precious few human hands in sight. And those human beings who do remain will be monitored and “supervised”, in the first instance, by technology, not people.

Does the human manager face obsolescence, then, to be replaced by shiny and unflinching machinery? Hardly. Computers process data at miraculous speeds, and are only getting quicker. But do they exercise judgment? Can they actually think? Or do they just do what we, the humans, tell them to do?

Writing for the McKinsey Quarterly in 1967, Drucker made his view clear. “We are beginning to realise that the computer makes no decisions; it only carries out orders. It’s a total moron, and therein lies its strength,” he wrote.

Again, technologists may quibble. Fifty years on, “artificial intelligence” and “machine learning” are held up as a powerful challenge to Drucker’s robust dismissal of supposedly moronic technology. Didn’t IBM’s Deep Blue defeat the apparently invincible Garry Kasparov at chess? And if that wasn’t good enough, how about Google’s AlphaGo, which beat the world Go champion only last year? That was simply not supposed to happen – Go being an infinitely subtle and varied game that requires the human touch and human insight to play it properly.

The march of the machines is formidable, irresistible, and broadly to be welcomed. The story of the last three hundred years, in compressed and over-simplified form, tells of technological innovation making old ways of doing things redundant, while greater efficiency is achieved, generating greater profits, making people better off and creating a need for new jobs and new kinds of work. (I warned you it was an over-simplified version.) Techno-pessimism is unhelpful and too gloomy by half. The basic fact of what is often called “digital transformation” or the “fourth industrial revolution” is that new jobs will be created even while others are destroyed.

What is not being destroyed is human life: human beings and their needs. This means that human-oriented goods and services will still be needed, delivered by other living, breathing human beings. And while work is still being carried out by people human managers will be needed, too. Drones and robots cannot do it all.

Consider the growing need for health and social care, demanded by citizens living longer and fuller lives. Robots may have a role to play here, perhaps to supplement and support the work done by people. But could a machine ever truly care for a person in the way that a well trained and managed living employee can? (That verb: to care. If we are using it properly it implies the presence of a living thing, not a robot. Robots may or may not be morons, but they surely do not care.)

Fifty years ago Drucker saw a paradoxical benefit in the arrival of computers. “It forces us to think, to set the criteria. The stupider the tool, the brighter the master has to be – and this is the dumbest tool we have ever had,” he said.

Computers are dumb no more. They have phenomenal capacity, processing power, and speed. They can learn. They can get better at what they do. They also don’t get tired, don’t complain, and require neither food, holiday, nor payment. They may be some people’s idea of the ideal employee.

But we need to keep the claims of the technologists in perspective. What is grandly labeled “artificial intelligence” may not always be quite as clever as all that. We should not presume that the machine will always come up with the best answer. Coders are human, after all. And as the writer Margaret Heffernan has observed, “Artificial intelligence is unlikely to be the solution to genuine stupidity.”

Management does not just mean caring; it means paying attention. Gadgets can monitor and measure how many steps we have taken or how quickly we have completed a task. But machines cannot supervise us in the way that a human manager can. Homo sapiens is not redundant yet.

In that same McKinsey article Drucker also observed: “We must learn to make knowledge productive.” This remains the fundamental human challenge facing human managers.

About the author:

Stefan Stern

Writer/speaker on business, politics, management

This article is one in a series related to the 10th Global Peter Drucker Forum, with the theme management. the human dimension, taking place on November 29 & 30, 2018 in Vienna, Austria #GPDF18

This article first appeared on Linkedin.

As the British politician Nye Bevan once asked: “Why look into the crystal ball when you can read the book?” Drucker, of course, left dozens of books for us to study. But in spite of his impressive output we seem to have lost sight of some of his timeless ideas. How many meetings that you attend begin with an agenda and the word “objectives” being written up on a flip-chart or other visual aid? And yet, a few (or more) hours later, how often has the discussion strayed far from the path that leaders declared they wanted to follow? “Mismanagement by missing objectives” was not what Drucker had in mind.

Over four decades ago Drucker alerted us to the emergence of something called a “knowledge worker”, who would have to be managed with great care. How good a job are we doing of managing them today? Drucker even suggested that we should think of our employees as, essentially, volunteers. And yet authoritarian corporate regimes continue to suppress initiative and new ideas, driving bright people away while preserving a sterile (and doomed) status quo. We had been warned, but we were not listening carefully enough.

In an age of over-complication and excessive noise Drucker’s voice can still cut through all the distractions. We need some of his lucidity today. We could start, for example, by turning again to his fundamental definition of the central task for any business: to “create” (find) and keep a customer. Is that what you are busy doing in your business? Is most of your energy being directed to meeting that challenge?

We could ask again his three basic questions for leaders: a) what business are you in? b) who are your customers? c) what are you doing for them that is valuable? These deceptively simple questions can force you to confront those under-discussed problems corporate leaders sometimes wish could just go away.

And we could recall perhaps his most important insight of all: that profitability is not in itself a purpose for business, just as breathing is not the purpose of life. Good businesses usually will be profitable, but commercial success comes as a result of doing the right things and operating in the right way.

In 1919 the Irish poet WB Yeats looked at the troubled post-war world and wrote:

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.”

(“The Second Coming”)

A dose of Drucker right now would help the best develop some conviction, and persuade the worst to abandon their destructive “passionate intensity”. We don’t need a new guru. PF Drucker will do.

 AUTHOR:

Stefan Stern, a former FT columnist, is Visiting Professor of management practice at the Cass Business School, London, and director of strategy at Edelman. He has attended all three of the previous Global Drucker Forum events.