Powerful leaders pose the most powerful questions by Stefan Güldenberg

The most effective leaders of the future will be those who have the most powerful and inspiring questions and who are willing to acknowledge they don’t have the answers, and that they need and want help in finding the answers. It’s in sharp contrast to the conventional view of leaders as the ones who have the answers to all the questions[…]

Continue reading

Making Management Great Again by Janka Krings-Klebe and Jörg Schreiner

Following the business news in the weeks after this year’s Drucker Forum, it became clear that management, as taught at business schools, is headed for irrelevance. Today it no longer solves problems. It creates them. So-called “best practices” of management have caused a multitude of problems that only became apparent after a delay of decades, but are now making themselves felt with force[…]

Continue reading

Leadership – more than good management? by Kathy Brewis

What is leadership, what are leaders for, and are leaders and managers really the same thing? This was the starting point of a lively discussion moderated by HBR’s Ania Wieckowski. She opened by noting that in any forum the debate around leadership vs management quickly becomes heated. These days, she said, leadership activities tend to be more highly regarded than management functions – perhaps because “having a vision” sounds more impressive than supervising.[…]

Continue reading

Peter Drucker in 2020: the challenge and privilege of transformation by Esther Clark

Peter Drucker predicted that by 2020 a new world – completely different from our grandparents’ reality – would exist. Drucker, father of modern management, explained in a 1992 essay for Harvard Business Review, that “every few hundred years throughout Western history, a sharp transformation has occurred. In a matter of decades, society altogether rearranges itself – its worldview, its basic values, its social and political structures, its arts, its key institutions.”[…]

Continue reading