We are in the midst of a “poly-crisis” – a broad-based failure of institutions – all of them suffering loss of performance in a complex and unpredictable world, and all experiencing an erosion of trust.

“Business” as a sector is holding up relatively better, perhaps because people believe it is kept in line by competitive forces and a grounding in reality rather than ideology.

The practice of management is still largely based in its industrial age roots – the discipline has not adapted to this new age. Digital technology plays a key role as a disruptive force – we have all seen the latest developments in AI! Yet, especially in the public sector, we observe a doubling down on old-style bureaucratic approaches which are now simply “enhanced” by digital tech and AI. A new digital Taylorism seems to be on the rise.

We are seeing an acute crisis of the institutions of society. This institutional crisis transcends business. It relates to all the institutions that constitute our society—those responsible for health care, education, public services provision, cultural assets, etc.

Most are falling short in their effectiveness and performance. Drucker referred to them as collectively comprising the “Social Ecology” of our societies. We could also describe them as making up the institutional ecosystem of a modern society.

Management, which Drucker called a “social technology,” is one of the key levers to address this crisis of collapsing performance, trust, and legitimacy.

We need to move from industrial age management to a new version of this social technology better suited to achieving collective performance in institutions and organizations in today’s world (The Next Management). Drucker foresaw that the greatest management challenge of the 21st century would be increasing the productivity of knowledge work (just as the great challenge of the past had been to increase the productivity of manual work—a challenge that spurred the great productivity surges in the economies of the 19th and 20th centuries). The new challenge reflects the huge proportion of value that now comes from knowledge and IP versus traditional products and services.

The industrial age management is associated with a set of characteristics such as strict hierarchy, top-down command and control, centralization, technocratic and bureaucratic processes, economies of scale, and self-centered, institutional silo-thinking.

The characteristics of The Next Management should be markedly different: empowerment, trust, decentralization, antifragility, horizontal and bottom-up, agility, experimentation and learning, and human-centered. Managers in this mode recognize their organizations are embedded in ecosystems and take a holistic view of institutions as innovators and value creators.

But there is nothing inevitable about these characteristics. There is a danger that The Next Management could take another form, perhaps moving in the direction of Theory X (in Douglas McGregor’s famous model of competing assumptions about worker motivations). We could see essentially a “perfected” version of industrial age management emerge, with its worst tendencies turned, by the application of digital tech and AI, into truly technocratic and totalitarian features.

The transition from industrial age management to the next management is already happening – albeit at a too slow pace. Yet this transition doesn’t mean that the existing practices are all obsolete. New management practice portfolios will evolve using what was useful from old management and new approaches – dependent on the context in which the organization is operating. Drucker’s mantra of continuity and change is still valid.

…making society
higher performing
and more humane
at the same time, by
unleashing human
talent, creativity,
and ingenuity and
channeling it with
a sense of purpose.

When Drucker first became interested in the administration of large businesses and other organizations in the 1940s, he observed that there was no comprehensive framework of “management” as a discipline – although certainly there were bits and pieces of understanding about how to improve performance in different areas of operation. He pulled existing work and his own observations together to make it a discipline. Similarly, today, The Next Management is not wholly defined or clearly understood. Many elements exist – Agile, Scrum, Design Thinking, Lean Startup, Anti-Fragility, learning organization, digital transformation, and more – but are scattered efforts with limited interaction among the practitioners and thinkers developing them. The Drucker Forum with the Vienna Center for Management Innovation (VCMI) can serve as one of the catalysts to bring the elements for The Next Management together and describe the larger objective they collectively serve. We can, for example, redefine what it means to be a “human-centric” organization—in an age of AI and other powerful digital technologies.

At the core of our endeavor is Peter Drucker, and his fundamental tenet that management should concern itself with making society higher performing and more humane at the same time, by unleashing human talent, creativity, and ingenuity and channeling it with a sense of purpose.

This should be our overarching theme in the period between this year’s fifteen Drucker Forum to our twentieth event in 2028. It will ensure a common thread in what we do and give us an inspiring sense of purpose as we work to reposition management as a noble and constitutive endeavor in society.

Anyone knowledgeable about management is well aware of the power of “disruptive innovation”—Clay Christensen’s term for how long-established and well-resourced enterprises can be upended by creative competitors focused on delivering more value to their customer bases. What many do not yet recognize, however, is that management itself—the whole set of rules and tools by which organizations are professionally run—is also in the process of being disrupted. As a profession and as a discipline, management has been stuck in a form that may continue to appeal to old-guard practitioners, scholars, and consultants, but to many of us looks increasingly obsolete.

First, let’s be clear about what we mean by “management.” What is this thing that must be, and is being, overhauled? The simple answer is that management is the corpus of rules and tools for running a complicated group effort well—the set of teachable learnings about “what works best” when people are trying to produce something of value through their collective efforts. Peter Drucker referred to it as a “social technology.” It is, in other words, a set of already devised and proven approaches and processes that enables motivated practitioners to accomplish much more than they could if they did not have it at hand.

Drucker was right to be proud of the world’s ever-accumulating management prowess. It is what, more than anything, has delivered increasing prosperity and relieved suffering in the world. Where famine, drought, and disease have declined most, it has been by better management. Where scientific discoveries have yielded broadly accessible solutions, these have been the results of management. Where middle classes have emerged and quality of life has improved, that has been due to management—and particularly so in market economies based on private ownership of assets. As Eric Beinhocker and Nick Hanauer put it: “Once we understand that the solutions capitalism produces are what creates real prosperity in people’s lives, and that the rate at which we create solutions is true economic growth, then it becomes obvious that entrepreneurs and business leaders bear a major part of both the credit and the responsibility for creating societal prosperity” (Beinhocker and Hanauer, 2014).

How Do We Know It Needs a Redesign?

So, what’s the problem? If management has been turned into a tractable and teachable subject, and has proved to be a powerful and positive force in the world, why is reinventing it such an imperative?

There’s a widespread, strong sense that neither the practice of management nor the discipline of how it is taught has evolved with the times. The world and its economy have gone through momentous technological and social changes in the last decades. Today, perhaps as much as any time in the past, people trying to keep their organizations productive and moving forward are confronted with a “poly-crisis” challenge—an environment in which surprising events as disparate as pandemics, proxy wars, overwhelming migrations, and artificial intelligence collide and complicate each other.

The situation calls to mind Thomas Kuhn’s classic explication of the dynamics that lead up to scientific revolutions. When the model a discipline has been relying on to make sense of the world and plan effective interventions is no longer fit for task, that shows up in the form of anomalies. Eventually, there are too many things the model fails to predict. There are too many interventions that fail to produce their intended effects. It becomes increasingly obvious that the model does not describe reality (Kuhn, 1962).

In the case of management, this is not because it was so imperfectly devised at the outset, given the reality of the mid-twentieth-century commercial context. It is because, today, that reality is different. Assembled in the first place as the compilation of “what works,” the body of knowledge known as Management still describes what worked in a world that no longer exists. Perhaps most important, the management we have inherited from the past was devised for a world of atoms and not bits, and a time when most people labored with their bodies more than their minds. The most important thing business administrators in the industrial age could do was to squeeze more productivity out of physical plants full of expensive capital equipment. That meant casting workers as highly fungible inputs, always subject to replacement by automation, and producing at ever greater scale—constantly, steadily pushing out the point where diminishing returns would kick in. Large-scale product production has not in the meantime become a bad idea (low prices still depend on scale efficiencies) but in modern economies dominated by knowledge work and knowledge workers, it’s a management obsession that is no longer relevant to the central elements of value creation.

The litany of what has changed could go on, but what is important is the question it invokes: Could it possibly be that the social technology of management as it currently exists—as mainly a set of practices and tools describing what worked best in twentieth-century corporations—could serve as well in a twenty-first-century context? Surely too much has changed all around it, as the discipline itself has changed too little.

What Will Next-Generation Management Emphasize?

So much has changed in the set of challenges confronting organizational leaders that it is impossible to do justice here to the subject, but at least a few major pillars can be described of what would constitute a next-generation version of management.

It would put a primary rather than secondary emphasis on the goal of innovation, and it would be more human-centered, seeing skilled, creative, and engaged people as the greatest source of value creation. It would define with more clarity the social engagement now required of businesses in societies beset by problems, and it would recognize the expanded scope of the manager’s role, from the control of an enterprise to a contribution to an ecosystem.

Exploration versus Exploitation

Is there enough innovation in the world? Looked at in one way, there is plenty—especially in whole new sectors like social media, new fields like data science and analytics, and new technologies like generative AI. Yet it is also evident that the world’s demand for fresh solutions vastly exceeds the supply. And, depending on how innovation output is measured, arguments have been made that it is actually on the decline (NBER, 2017).

The discipline of management has a built-in bias toward “exploitation” versus “exploration,” to use James March’s famous terms. In the slower-moving commercial environment of the past, the way to generate a healthy surplus was to build a business around an already proven solution and crank it out at scale, at a consistent, acceptable level of quality. Generations of managers have had this risk-averse mindset pounded into their consciousness, and it continues to shape their decisions even as it has become obvious that the winners in competitive markets are now the greatest innovators in their sectors.

As Scott Anthony frames it, the challenge today is one of “breaking down the barriers to innovation.” (Anthony et al., 2019). Companies and the societies they serve are being deprived of many new solutions that could be created because of holdover management approaches that impede them. It’s all the more important to reorient management toward the pursuit of innovation given that the investment environment creates incentives for them to do otherwise. When the focus is on short-term returns to impatient shareholders, top management teams pay a penalty for making investments that will not pay off within a few quarters, if indeed they pay off at all, and they are rewarded for cost-cutting moves, many of which are in areas important to building the future (Cheng et al., 2007; Barton et al., 2016; Graham et al., 2005).

Peter Drucker saw clearly that to put innovation at the center of your objectives was a fundamental shift in mindset. In his words: “Innovation is more than a new method. It is a new view of the universe, as one of risk rather than of chance or of certainty. It is a new view of man’s role in the universe; he creates order by taking risks. And this means that innovation, rather than being an assertion of human power, is an acceptance of human responsibility.”

People versus Plant

The idea that “people are our greatest asset” is, on the one hand, hardly new. On the other hand, it is not a belief reflected in the version of management we have inherited from the industrial age and continue for the most part to sustain. In a next-generation version, much more attention and energy will be devoted to how talent is cultivated and how it is best leveraged in organizational settings.

What we could term “Management 1.0” is characterized by hierarchy, top-down command and control, centralization, technocratic and bureaucratic processes, economies of scale, self-centered institutional silo-thinking. Its structure corresponds to what psychologist Douglas McGregor called Theory X of human motivation: it assumes that people in a paid work setting don’t want responsibility, need to be told what to do, and require close supervision to prevent shirking or backsliding. Management is the system that makes them productive in spite of themselves. McGregor offered Theory X as the foil to a more enlightened view of people management, Theory Y, which assumes that people are intrinsically motivated to do good work that has positive impact, all the more in collective efforts—making it the job of management not to police their worst tendencies but to create conditions that cultivate and leverage their best ones.

Theory X worked, up to a point, for highly routinized or assembly-line work, but even the business builder most associated with it, Henry Ford, recognized the flaw in it. “Why is it,” he is said to have asked in a mock-rueful tone, “that every time I ask for a pair of hands, they come with a brain attached?” Today, it is the brain that is primarily being asked for. And knowledge work, which situates the means of production inside the human head, requires a different approach – one that fosters initiative, discretionary effort, and self-direction.

Again, this is not new territory. We’ve been citing work done more than half a century ago by McGregor, and extensive work has been done since to build the case for management approaches based on trust, empowerment, learning, and encouragement of imagination and experimentation. Other studies have called for managers to dismantle hierarchical structures and replace them with more decentralized and flat ones, where decisions can percolate from the bottom up and where everyone is attuned to the workings of a greater ecosystem beyond the walls of their organization. And yet, the old paradigm of management continues to assert itself in ways subtle and not so subtle, with the people of the organization cast not as the essential driver of success but as the expendable drag on efficient production, ideally to be replaced by less high-maintenance machines.

Making management more human-centered implies many meaningful changes but perhaps the most salient to the moment is the rethinking it forces on the proper application of technology—in particular, the application of artificial intelligence. Next-gen management thinking insists that the proper use of this technology is to augment and not simply to automate human work. The first rule of AI application becomes that it must relieve humans of mind-numbingly tedious paperwork that adds nothing to their knowledge or creativity, and requires no human insight to perform. All the better if it is work that no human was doing in the past, so that having it performed by a smart machine threatens no crippling staff reductions.

The advent of AI and its increasing application in business makes it all the more urgent that we redefine what constitutes excellence in management and how to achieve it—because things could go in either of the two directions McGregor outlined, and whichever path we take will be exponentially advanced by these powerful technologies. A next-generation version of management could, that is, be a Theory-X-based approach on steroids, with AI tools deployed to detect and punish bad behavior by workers regarded as fundamentally unmotivated and untrustworthy. Or it could be a Theory-Y-based investment in a powerful set of new tools to place in the hands of empowered, purpose-inspired people who are therefore able to increase their contributions to the organization—and society—and see that value creation recognized and rewarded. With AI as co-pilot, the productivity of knowledge work could be boosted substantially. One optimistic recent projection suggests that AI could give global GDP an astonishing $14 trillion shot in the arm, and claims that, even in the next, transitional decade, “under most scenarios, more jobs will be gained than lost.” (Manyika and Sence, 2023).

Which of these futures unfolds more generally has everything to do with how managers understand their roles and their goals, and the prevailing norms and standards of the profession of which they are members.

Social Enhancements versus Shareholder Enrichment

Few pressures have created more headaches for managers in recent years than the increased demand by social activists for organizations—especially private sector businesses—to take stands and take action on social issues beyond their traditionally tightly-focused realms of commerce and influence. Reluctance to weigh in on hot-button issues invites “naming and shaming” from those who equate silence with violence. Proactive stance-taking leads to boycotts and, if too many customers defect, to shareholder lawsuits.

It would seem that we have reached the apotheosis of an argument that has been building since Drucker’s own time over the question of what constitutes social responsibility in a business. A new management model should make it a priority to clarify for managers, and those who would judge their conduct, the most important ways in which their work should advance the progress of their societies.

Drucker came to his own answer, which was a nuanced one. In a nutshell, “the proper social responsibility of business is… to turn a social problem into economic opportunity and economic benefit, into productive capacity, into human competence, into well-paid jobs, and into wealth.” (Drucker, 1984). It’s a statement of responsibility that we might say advises managers to “stay in their lane” but at the same time gives them a big lane to fill. Certainly, with its emphasis on social problem-solving and enhancing workers’ competence and compensation, it is no endorsement of a laser-focus on maximizing shareholder value. But neither does it demand of managers that they assert themselves as political actors and commit their organizations to stances on socially divisive issues that are not universally shared by the people of the organization.

Whether this is the direction that a next-generation management model would prescribe, the point here is that, to be useful to practitioners, that model should offer guidance on a problem that is new and pervasive in their work.

Ecosystems versus Enterprises

It has become normal today to talk about commercial “ecosystems” and the opportunities they represent for larger-scale value creation. But practice has not caught up with language change in this regard. We are still in the early stages of understanding the implications of an ecosystems view for management. Yet one thing is immediately clear. Management of an ecology is as different from managing a stand-alone, boundaried, rationally planned organization (the unit of management concern up till now) as quantum is from Newtonian physics.

Complex, dynamic, evolving, shape-shifting, and with results that are hard to predict, ecosystems upend all our previous management certainties and the linear thinking that goes with them. Being organic, they require tending rather than commanding, and the different kind of thinking that goes with it: imagination, adaptability, experimentation, and empathy, instead of the meticulous planning and goal setting of the past. Attempting to manage and sustain natural and institutional ecosystems with today’s machine metaphor for companies, with concomitant top-down control and bureaucratic processes, is worse than fruitless—it is counterproductive.

We Need to Get this Right—and Soon

This essay began with the observation that the disruption of management is not only overdue but is already underway. Many have already turned their frustration with an outmoded management model into action, experimenting with and researching approaches that deviate from the norm. Visions of the future of management, in part or in whole, have been developed in many quarters by many brilliant minds. The work of Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini comes first to mind, with its strong advocacy of a reorientation to innovation and a dismantling of initiative-crushing hierarchy and bureaucracy. Julian Birkinshaw, who helped Hamel found what they called The Management Lab, has also written extensively on the subject of reinventing management. Some others whose work we especially respect include Amy Edmondson, whose work has done so much to make organizations more conducive to learning from experience; Curt Carlson, who has dedicated himself to developing approaches to value creation and teaching a new generation to see that as their responsibility; Steve Denning, who tirelessly advocates for work settings that are more humanistic and agile in spotting and solving problems; Zeynep Ton, whose airtight case for more “good jobs” is a forceful challenge to employment trends moving in exactly the opposite direction; and Michael Jacobides, with his insightful analyses of business ecosystems and the challenges they present to managers.

There are innovative businesses, too, experimenting with new approaches and achieving better results. One that has been especially generous in sharing those learnings is Haier, which has translated its founder Zhang Ruimin’s embrace of “Theory Y” thinking into a model based on radical decentralization and empowerment of small units to respond as they see fit to their customers’ needs. Another is Vinci group whose longtime leader Xavier Huillard has decomposed the company into thousands of entrepreneurial entities held together by a strong common culture and wide framework of strategic directions. Yet each company of the group devises its own business strategy.

That there should be such a profusion of activity and experiments springing up in such scattered, uncoordinated ways is all to the good: it is the sign of an authentic, pressing need and an organic movement to meet it. The transformation of management can only happen if it taps into a pent-up demand for change. At the same time, the change can be accelerated by doing more to pull these separate ideas and energies together.

Drucker also liked to refer to the “social ecology” in which any managed entity was situated. All societies are made up of many complementary, overlapping, and competing organizations and institutions. We can think of the social ecology of management as comprising practitioners across business, government, and nonprofit sectors, plus management scholars and researchers across many fields (economics, psychology, sociology, ethics, computer science, engineering, and more), management consultants, knowledge workers, regulators, and more. With this system view in mind, we can think like ecologists about how to bring about systemic change. No one is in charge of the whole ecology, but action can be taken on multiple levels to influence it with deliberate interventions.

First, we can accelerate the progress toward a next-generation model of management merely by bringing separate strands of effort into contact with each other. By convening conversations among these various parties, we can provide the creative friction that makes collaborative efforts fruitful.

We can also invest in efforts to synthesize the learnings from diverse projects and people and understanding how they relate to each other and could combine into higher-level understandings of the problems and emerging phenomena challenging managers.

We can commit to and provide guidance to additional work in areas that seem under-developed, perhaps by announcing grand challenges and by highlighting intriguing new lines of inquiry.

We can elevate and celebrate accomplishments and experiments that are clearly important advances toward a next-generation management. It’s a basic truth of social psychology that leaders should celebrate what they want to see more of. When an organization puts in place an effective new way of getting things done and proves the value of a new approach that others can also adopt, that breakthrough should be acclaimed. When a theorist reframes a managerial problem in a way that opens up new avenues for progress, there should be something akin to a Nobel Prize in Management.

Finally, it will accelerate the work simply to keep reminding the players involved of the importance of the effort. The reinvention of management to become more well matched to the conditions of the twenty-first century, and to enable a new century of progress and prosperity in the world, is something this whole managerial community should be bending its efforts to bring about.

Time for a Purposeful Change

A society is made up of institutions, and in the healthiest societies, we find the highest-performing institutions. This is the responsibility of management—to continually raise performance—whether we are talking about the management of a team or a multinational corporation, or talking about the entire concept, profession, and discipline of management.

And just as expert artisans craft not only products of increasing quality but also tools of greater utility, dedicated managers must be prepared to reconsider the toolkit of their “social technology.” Constantly it is being tweaked and adapted on the margins to tackle new challenges and changing circumstances. Sometimes the change required is more sweeping.

It may be that unlike in physics and other hard sciences, there are no absolutes to be discovered about what works in the practice of management. Yet we can agree on the fundamental need for it and its overarching goal: to build prosperity in societies by sustaining a virtuous circle of perceiving new opportunities, pursuing them with imagination and energy, attracting people to the challenge with work arrangements that honor human strengths and develop human potential, and ultimately providing solutions that make the world a better place. If we get this “Next Management” right, it will lift all boats, including the drive to create a more sustainable world: we will finally leave the prescriptive top-down mandates behind us and give freedom to innovators and entrepreneurs to find solutions that nobody has ever been thinking about. This will be the Next Sustainability.

Unser digitales Sommerforum ist ein Meilenstein auf dem Weg zur Konferenz, die uns im November in der Wiener Hofburg persönlich zusammenführen wird. Beide Veranstaltungen firmieren unter einem gemeinsamen Titel: Performance that matters – Leistung, auf die es ankommt.

Wie misst man die Leistung eines Unternehmens? Das scheint heute noch komplexer als früher. Zu Druckers Zeiten bezeichnete «Leistung» einfach die wirtschaftliche Leistung. Drucker betonte, dass ein Unternehmen in wirtschaftlicher Hinsicht erfolgreich sein muss, bevor es Ressourcen für andere Ziele erübrigen kann. Allerdings wies er auch darauf hin, dass Unternehmensführung ein moralisches Unterfangen sei: Die Erhöhung der Gewinnspannenoder die Schaffung von noch mehr Shareholder-Value könne nicht die einzige «raison d’être» sein – vor allem wenn man bedenkt, welche Auswirkungen Unternehmen auf Kunden, Arbeitnehmer, Gemeinden und letztlich die Umwelt haben.

“Zwei Jahre nach meinem Tod wird sich niemand mehr an mich erinnern.“ Das meinte Peter Drucker in einem seinen letzten Lebensjahren zu seiner Frau Doris. So berühmt er auch gewesen sein mochte, so sehr war ihm bewusst, dass Erinnerung rasch verblasste. Im ersten Jahr des Druckerforums versprach ich unserer Mentorin und Freundin Doris Drucker daher, dass wir hart daran arbeiten würden, die Erinnerung an Peter Drucker hochzuhalten. Gerade in Zeiten von Krisen und Verwirrung können wir so viel von ihm lernen! Und tatsächlich sind wir darum bemüht, sein geistiges Erbe zu ehren, indem wir drängende Managementfragen ernsthaft und
tiefgreifend zu analysieren versuchen.

Den Background für das diesjährige Forum liefert die wohlbekannte Abfolge der jüngsten Krisen – mit Pandemie, Lockdowns und dem Krieg inder Ukraine. Nicht zu vergessen jene Probleme, die schon viel länger unter der Oberfläche köcheln: steigende Verschuldung, die Spaltung der Gesellschaft, wachsende Ungleichheiten, eingeschränkte Freiheit und Privatsphäre oder zunehmende Bürokratisierung. Jahrelang konnten wir uns durchschummeln – nun aber droht der Riesencrash. Oft spricht man im Zusammenhang mit dem Nachhall einer Krise von einer «neuen Normalität», die sich einstellen würde. Was uns jedoch droht, ist deutlich ernster – und wesentlich größer. Es ist, als ob sich vor unseren Augen eine neue Weltordnung herausbilden: sowohl geopolitisch als auch sozial und wirtschaftlich. Wir sind Zeugen der Geburt einer neuen, anderen Welt – ein schmerzhafter und gefährlicher Prozess.

Was wir bisher für ein unerschütterliche Tatsache hielten, wird mit einem Mal obsolet: etwa die Annahme, dass Globalisierung einuneingeschränktes Gut, Inflation leicht zu zähmen sei und Zinssätze auf Dauer niedrig bleiben würden; dass die effizientesten und robustesten Lieferketten globale seien, dass reife Volkswirtschaften immun wären gegen Nahrungsmittel- oder Energieunsicherheit, dass Gesundheitsversorgung immer effektiver und zugänglicher würde, dass Armut überall zurückgehe und die Gefahr eines Atomkriegs ein für alle Mal gebannt sei.

Drucker stellte fest, dass die großen Einkommens- und Wohlstandszuwächse in der Welt auf die verbesserte Leistung von Organisationen und Institutionen zurückgeführt werden können – zunächst im Westen nach der industriellen Revolution und in den letzten Jahrzehnten zunehmend auch in Schwellenund Entwicklungsländern. Was wir als „Management“ bezeichnen, ist dabei nichts anderes als eine enorme soziale Innovation. Wir vergessen gern, dass die immensen Wohlstandsfortschritte, die wir im Westen in den letzten zwei Jahrhunderten erlebt haben und die uns hochdifferenzierte Bildung, gute Gesundheitsversorgung, Sozialsysteme und Mobilität gebracht haben, nicht allein auf den Fortschritt in Wissenschaft, Technologie und Innovation zurückzuführen sind. Die neue Sozialtechnologie, das so genannte Management, hat es möglich gemacht, in großem Umfang Werte zu schaffen, die das Leben so vieler Menschen verbessert haben. Ein neuer CovidImpfstoff etwa wird niemandem helfen, wenn wir nicht in der Lage sind, ihn in großem Maßstab zu produzieren und an diejenigen zu verteilen, die ihn brauchen.

Nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg hatten wir viele gute Jahre, was vor allem im Westen zu einer gewissen Selbstgefälligkeit und ideologischen Hybris führte. Doch wie Andy Grove von Intel es so treffend feststellte, führt selbstgefällige Zufriedenheit mit dem Status Quo geradewegs in den Untergang. Was wir in der Zeit nach der industriellen Revolution aufgebaut haben, ist keine Selbstverständlichkeit: Allerdings dürfen wir uns nicht auf dem Erreichten ausruhen, sondern müssen auf Innovation und Erneuerung setzen, um auch in schwierigen Zeiten erfolgreich zu sein.

Gutes Management besteht zu einem großen Teil darin, Prioritäten zu identifizieren. Und es werden nicht jene von gestern sein! Was wir über Energie, Ernährung, Klima, Effizienz, Inflation, Arbeit und Management dachten, wird neu bewertet werden müssen. Möglicherweise werden wir auch Kompromisse eingehen, die früher nicht denkbar waren: Wirtschaft versus Soziales versus Umwelt, kurzfristig versus langfristig – wenn etwa eine Hungersnot droht, kann es sinnvoll sein, die Angst vor gentechnisch veränderten Lebensmitteln zu überwinden. Einer der «positiven» Nebeneffekte der Megakrise könnte sein, dass wir uns klarer darüber werden, was für die Menschheit wirklich zählt. Von der politischen Führung über die Manager bis hin zu den Akteuren der Zivilgesellschaft: Sämtliche Akteure werden ihre Agenda überdenken müssen. Mehr vom Immergleichen ist nicht (mehr) gut genug.

Diese kritische Selbstbetrachtung gilt auch für die Praxis des Managements selbst: Wie viel vom Management des 20. Jahrhunderts ist heute noch gültig? Wenn Druckers Postulat immer noch aktuell ist – nämlich, dass die Aufgabe des Managements darin besteht, die richtige Balance zwischen Kontinuität und Wandel zu finden – wie entscheiden wir dann, was bleibt und was geht?

Jamie Dimon von JP Morgan sagte einen drohenden wirtschaftlichen Wirbelsturm voraus. Gleichzeitig warnte er davor, sich zu verstecken und zu versuchen, die Krise auszusitzen: Wir müssten uns der Herausforderung stellen. Politiker werden schnell an ihre Grenzen stoßen,wenn es darum geht, Gelder auszuschütten, die sie nicht haben. Das Überleben, geschweige denn der Fortschritt, wird von denjenigen abhängen, die bereit sind, die Herausforderungmit ganzem Einsatz anzunehmen und zu stemmen: Unternehmer, Innovatoren, Manager und Beamte, die durch ein gemeinsames Ziel verbunden sind. Schließlich geht es um nicht weniger als darum, eine lebenswerte Welt für die Generationen nach uns zu schaffen. Ein Weg, der nur frei von Ideologie beschritten werden kann. Und mit einem starken Sinn für das Machbare.

Dies ist auch die Dynamik, die wir mit dem Druckerforum entfesseln wollen. Falls Sie sich fragen, welchen Einfluss ein Einzelner haben kann, so erinnern Sie sich nur an die Komplexitätstheorie und was sie über das
Handeln lehrt: Bekanntlich kann der Flügelschlag eines Schmetterlings einen Luftstrom erzeugen, der stetig an Kraft gewinnt und schließlich zueinem Sturm irgendwo auf der Welt wird. Lassen Sie uns beginnen, unsere eigenen kleinen und großen Flügelschläge zu erzeugen, um die Welt zum Besseren zu verändern.

Ich wünsche uns allen eine großartige Konferenz und eine fundierte und ernsthafte Diskussion über Leistung, auf die es ankommt – für den Einzelnen, für das Team, die Organisation, das Ökosystem und die Gesellschaft insgesamt.

This Digital Forum is a big step on the way to our in-person Forum in November in the Vienna Hofburg. The two events share one overarching theme – performance that matters. Moving the needle on the performance of an enterprise has always been a challenge – and in today’s world it is increasingly complex. In Drucker’s day, “performance” simply meant economic performance—and Drucker himself emphasized that an enterprise must succeed in economic terms before it could devote resources to other objectives. Yet Drucker also stressed that taking on the responsibility of managing a business was a moral undertaking. Expanding profit margins, or creating more shareholder value, could not be the sole “raison d’être” given the very real impact organizations have on their customers, workers, communities, and natural environment.

Doris Drucker, our friend and mentor when we launched the Drucker Forum in 2009, told me about a comment Peter Drucker made in the last years of his life. Famous as he then was, he also knew how quickly the public memory fades. “Two years after I’m gone,” he said, “nobody will remember me.” I told Doris we would work hard to prevent that, because the world still has so much to learn from Drucker – and we especially need his wisdom now, in a time of crisis and great confusion. We try to honor his spirit by taking a broad and deep perspective on the most pressing questions of our time as they relate to management, and not hosting the kind of superficial, politicized, mainstream discussion that can be found in many places.

The backdrop to this year’s Forum is the recent sequence of crises we have experienced in the pandemic, the lockdowns, and the Ukraine war. But there have also long been other major issues smoldering under the surface: mounting debt levels, increasing fractures in our societies, worsening inequalities, diminished freedom and privacy, growing bureaucratization of our lives, and more. For years we were able to muddle through – but now we face a threat of mega-disruption. People often talk about the aftermath of a crisis as settling into a “new normal”—but this is bigger. It seems a new world order is emerging in front of our eyes: geopolitical, social, and economic. A very different world is being born – in a painful and perilous process.

Some basic assumptions are being swept away: for example, that globalization is an unalloyed good, that inflation is easy to tame, that interest rates will remain low in perpetuity, that the most efficient and robust supply chains are global ones, that mature economies are immune to food or energy insecurity, that health care will become ever more effective and accessible, that poverty is everywhere on the decline, and that conflicts will never go nuclear, to name just a few.

Drucker observed that, where there have been great gains in income and wellbeing in the world, they have derived from the improving performance of organizations and institutions – first in the west, after the industrial revolution, and in recent decades increasingly in emerging and developing countries as well. We tend to forget that these immense gains – including comprehensive education systems, universal healthcare, research institutions, social protection and mobility – were not the product of science, engineering, and research alone. It was above all the new social technology called “management” that drove the value creation at unprecedented scale that improved so many lives.

We had many good years after the Second World War, building societies that were successful by numerous measures – and, especially in the west, this led to some complacency and ideological arrogance. But as Intel’s Andy Grove observed, complacency breeds failure, and he might also see now as the moment to inject a degree of paranoia into our thinking. What we have acquired in the time after the industrial revolution is not a given: we have to defend it, again and again, and avoid major breakdowns with their catastrophic consequences for humanity.

Much of good management is about focusing on the right priorities. No longer can we treat the priorities of yesterday as the priorities of today. What we thought about energy, food, climate, efficiency, inflation, work, and management will not necessarily be the same in the future. New trade-offs may be required: economics vs social vs environmental, short term vs long term – so when famine threatens, we may need to move past fears of GMOs, for example. One of the “positive” side-effects of the mega-crisis may be that we get more real about what is really important for human life. From political leaders to managers to civil society players, all actors need to review their agenda. More of the same is not good enough. Extrapolating their narratives to the future won’t work any more, if  it ever did.

This critical introspection applies to the practice of management as well. How much of 20^th century management remains valid today? What classic principles of management still apply and what should change? If Drucker is still right that management’s job is to strike the right balance between continuity and change, how do we decide what stays and what goes?

JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon recently predicted a looming economic hurricane in the wake of the consecutive Crises we experience. But he warned that we shouldn’t try to hunker down to sit out the crisis. We need to step up to the challenge. Politicians will quickly come up against the limits of bailing out anyone in need with money they don’t have. Survival, let alone progress, will be down to those who are ready to take on the challenge with their flesh, blood and brain  – entrepreneurs, innovators, managers and civil servants driven by a common purpose grounded in an urgent sense of reality to build a future for the generations to come. Ideology, of whatever color, will be a bad guide to the future.

This is the energy we want to inspire at the Drucker Forum. You might ask what influence any one of us can have individually. Yet think about complexity theory and what it teaches about taking action. Famously, the flap of a butterfly’s wing can generate an air current that gathers force and eventually becomes a giant storm somewhere in the world. Let’s each start making our own moves, large and small, to change the world for the better.

I wish us all a great conference and a continuing deep and serious discussion on performance that matters – for the individual, for the team, the organization, the ecosystem and society at large.

This year we have – we believe – made good progress in moving out of the worst of the crisis cycle triggered by Covid. But we have absolutely no cause for complacency.

To head off social and economic breakdown, governments and central banks have borrowed from the future in unprecedented ways. And during the crisis digital technology has shown both sides of its Janus face: affording huge benefits in the international collaborations that have given us life-saving vaccines at record speed, at the same time as endangering freedom and self-determination in the way it has been used to manipulate attitudes and blur or deny the truth.

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.
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As we emerge from Covid, attention will have to shift from spending to actually earning the advances we have taken. There is only one way to achieve this – broad-based innovation and value creation, which puts a premium on better management than we have ever achieved before. As Peter Drucker proclaimed, only well-managed organizations and institutions can generate a society that is at the same time both high-performing and human. A perfect society is unachievable by humanity, and therefore, whatever the techno-utopians think, deeply inhuman; but a democratic, functioning one is within our reach.

The bottom line is that the human being in all its imperfection and splendor cannot be replaced by technology, as some people would like to suggest. All important issues must be viewed through the human lens first, not from a technology perspective. This is the stand that we want to make in the face of an increasingly technology-centric world. Drucker gives us the legitimacy and the vision for a well-functioning human society powered by effective organizations and institutions​ – and thus also a positive basis on which to bring together technologists and humanists in a constructive global dialogue on a future that must be both digital and human. But always human first. ​Let our conference mark the beginning of this historic process.

The Drucker Forum journey that we have mapped out this year closely reflects these new realities. In June we brought together our community for a virtual Day of Drucker, something we could only do with the aid of digital technology. But the aim was to prepare the ground for this Forum– two days of virtual events culminating in this face-to-face event on ‘the human imperative’.

In this spirit we cordially welcome you back to Vienna for the 13th Peter Drucker Forum, destined to be one of the most important ever.

Richard Straub

Founder and President

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.
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by Julia Kirby and Richard Straub

As exponentially advancing digital technology transforms so much of work and the world, questions inevitably arise about the place of the human being. Some warn of a diminishing role for the human, such as in decision-making, starting perhaps with the simple tasks now performed by chatbots, but soon enough in more creative problem-solving. It is easy to imagine technology’s superhuman powers – its advanced algorithms, deep learning networks, and other AI strengths, its Blockchain dynamics, big data processing, and so forth—taking us inexorably toward the Singularity Ray Kurzweil envisions.

The questions are all the more urgent given the rate of change around us. It’s true that the future is always uncertain – remember the old quip, “prediction is difficult, especially about the future” – but today we are faced with heightened, and seemingly increasing, turbulence. Many look to technology to provide the confidence needed to navigate through uncertainty.

Yet there is a countercurrent emerging that calls for reasserting the human role. The experience of cities and nations responding to the COVID-19 crisis has emboldened these voices, as it highlights the human creativity and judgment essential not only to balance competing social and ethical priorities but to accomplish scientific breakthroughs and overcome logistical challenges. The same countercurrent is rising inside organizations where “data-driven” decision-making so often falls short of the sound judgment that, however tainted by cognitive biases, combines science with common sense.

As economic, fiscal, cultural, and political crises escalate in the wake of pandemic, the tension between the technocratic and the humanistic forces is reaching a breaking point. The former see a time of upheaval as an opportune moment to effect a large-scale “reset” to a system currently flawed in many ways. The latter reject any such revolutionary redesign as inimical to human nature which craves, as Peter Drucker put it, a balance between “change and continuity.” Which is the best way forward, and how can we ensure that it prevails? 

Leading thinkers at our 2021 Forum will grapple with important questions including but not limited to the following:

• Must there be a human imperative at the core of organizations? How would we define it? What threatens it most today? How could good management serve it better?
• Forced to make decisions under highly dynamic conditions, should organizations rely more heavily on data and analytics? What are the risks of moving away from human judgment?
• Do we need better ways of discovering truth and thinking through the complex issues of our time? What insights should we take from philosophy, psychology, and other realms to prepare our minds for the age of AI?
• What should we hope for—and fear—in the aftermath of a year of remote working? Will less in-person contact become the norm? How might human beings as social animals and community builders respond?
• What lessons can we take from the Covid-19 crisis about the clashing perspectives of scientific experts, policymakers, business leaders, and ordinary citizens and workers—and how they should be prioritized or integrated to best serve the needs of humanity? 
• As in every time of upheaval, some today say we should not let “a serious crisis go to waste.” But is seizing the chance to enact sweeping change a humane impulse? What can we learn from the history of sudden revolutions, whether political, cultural, or organizational?
• Central to the human condition is the ability to learn from evidence and experience—both our own and others’. How is it, then, that human organizations prove so resistant to collective learning? How do we stop making the same mistakes?
• What changes to management education would better equip managers with the knowledge and competences they need today? Are there useful models to be found in how other professions are mastered?
• Peter Drucker insisted that to be a change leader, an organization must also “establish continuity internally and externally.” But that human-friendly balance he advised means nothing to a computer. Is it still valid as a principle for management?
• So much of recent human achievement has resulted from growing capabilities in administration and leadership that the past hundred years have been called “the management century.” How can we extend that run and make even greater progress in the future?

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.
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Welcome to the Drucker Forum 2020, with a theme this year of “leadership everywhere.”

It is a theme we chose a year ago, before anyone could know the challenges that 2020 would bring. As it turned out, this year cast a bright spotlight on the performance of leaders everywhere – and the light has not always been flattering.

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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We all know that the quality of leadership matters in a crisis, but I think we tend to think of that as a set of reactive skills – as in, leaders who can respond quickly to terrible events and make sense of chaos. Just as important is to think of the proactive challenge – having a good leadership system in place well in advance of a crisis so that an organization or a society can weather the storm when it hits. We have all learned in this year of pandemic how the people who are at greatest risk are those with preexisting conditions. The same is true for organizations and societies: many of the worst hit had chronic issues limiting them – and I would suggest that the most debilitating preexisting condition for some has been their leadership deficiency.

Perhaps the most striking lesson about leadership we can take away from this year is that leaders have an enormous responsibility to understand when tradeoffs have to be made between conflicting  priorities. This was the point of an article that Roger Martin, Julia Kirby, and I published recently with Harvard Business Review. Perhaps you have seen it. We urged developing leaders not to make the mistake of relying on technocratic methods when the decisions they face are really about what weights to place on competing values.

Another big leadership lesson of 2020 has been that finding a path to an acceptable balance requires not  only wisdom but courage. Courage is not waiting to see how things trend on social media, and caving in to the most strident constituencies – and neither is that leadership. It is, at best following, and possibly following in a very wrong direction.

And finally, even a smart and courageous leader can fall short if he or she doesn’t have legitimacy. This year’s reminder of that came from the policymakers and executives who talked the most about how they would do nothing but “follow the science.” Only leaders who have failed to earn the trust of their people have to rely so heavily on the borrowed authority of experts.

All this is true in business, as well. Data give us fragments of reality, but sound human judgement remains indispensable. In complex situations, it is folly to rely on one single domain of expertise to determine the way forward. Great leaders are great synthesizers, able to call on multiple perspectives, including history and philosophy. Education and culture matter.

When I asked Doris Drucker 10 years ago what was most important to Peter, her answer was clear: it was the human being, not as a slogan but in all its complex reality. Of course, humans are toolmakers, and we want technologies, including in digital form, to make important contributions by making work easier and filling human needs. But to create and support a functioning society, leaders can’t center their attention on technology development and adoption. They must be first and foremost devoted to realizing human potential, and always working to deepen their human understanding and connections.

It’s no accident that concerns like these were central to the work of two distinguished management thinkers to whom, with a heavy heart, we say goodbye this year. One is our friend and mentor Clay Christensen. If you have been to past Forums you may have met him or heard him speak. Please try to take part in the special tribute to his ideas and impact that we have included on the program. The other lost friend is Joseph Maciarello, Peter Drucker’s closest collaborator at Claremont and perhaps the nearest thing he had to an academic successor. Joe’s focus was on management as liberal art, and he worked tirelessly until the end to bring this founding concept to life for students and managers.

I am the first to admit that a virtual format cannot replicate the richness of the conversation and connections with old and new friends that have always been central to the Drucker Forums in Vienna. But in a very Druckerian way, we have risen to the challenge of weaving together threads of change and continuity. Our digital team has been phenomenal in their efforts to ensure that our online experience will be well ordered and satisfying. You will find new ways to engage with content, speakers and with fellow conference participants. And certainly you will find much content to choose from: we are proud that the 2020 program features the richest menu of options we have ever offered and a truly unprecedented slate of thinkers, practitioners, and moderators. In fact, there is no way you could experience it all in the space of a few days, so we are making replays of all sessions available to conference participants.

As for that usual great benefit of conference attendance—professional networking—we have thought of that, too. Please make use of our networking lounge both for side conversations you decide to arrange and for spontaneous chats, just as you would in Vienna. It is open throughout the event.

I think all of us together will learn a fair bit about how best to engage with and enjoy and online Drucker Forum. Without doubt, we will learn a lot about leadership. I wish all of us a rewarding experience.

Richard Straub

Founder and President

Global Peter 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.
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Or, just as bad, you’ll trust your instincts on a matter where a straightforward data analysis would expose how off-base your understanding is.

Mistakes like this happen all the time, because different kinds of human effort require different kinds of knowledge. This is no novel claim of our own — it’s only what Aristotle explained more than 2,000 years ago. He outlined distinct types of knowledge required to solve problems in three realms. Techne was craft knowledge: learning to use tools and methods to create something. Episteme was scientific knowledge: uncovering the laws of nature and other inviolable facts that, however poorly understood they might be at the moment, “cannot be other than they are.” Phronesis was akin to ethical judgment: the perspective-taking and wisdom required to make decisions when competing values are in play — when the answer is not absolute, multiple options are possible, and things can be other than what they are. If you’re a farmer designing an irrigation system or a software engineer implementing an agile process, you’re in the techne realm. If you’re an astronomer wondering why galaxies rotate the way they do, you’re in the epistemic realm. If you’re a policymaker deciding how to allocate limited funds, you’re in the phronesis realm.

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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The reason that Aristotle bothered to outline these three kinds of knowledge is that they require different styles of thinking—the people toiling in each of these realms tend toward habits of mind that serve them well, and distinguish them from the others. Aristotle’s point was that, if you have a phronetic problem to solve, don’t send an epistemic thinker.

But imagine that you’re a leader of a large enterprise that has challenges cropping up regularly in all three of these realms. There are plenty of techne problems as you work to adopt effective methods and tools in your operations. You also have epistemic challenges; anything you approach as an optimization problem (like your marketing mix or your manufacturing scheduling) assumes there is one absolutely right answer out there. And firmly in the realm of phronesis would be anything you label a “strategic” matter — decisions on mergers and new product launches, for example, involving trade-offs and recognizing that the future holds various possibilities. As a leader presiding over such a multifaceted organization, it’s a big part of your job to make sure the right kinds of thinking are being marshaled to make those different kinds of decisions. This means that you personally need to have some facility with all the different modes of thinking — at least enough to recognize which one is the best fit to a given problem, and which people are particularly adept at it.

That’s all the more true for the largest leadership challenges in the modern world, those that are scoped so broadly and are so complex that all these kinds of thinking are called for by one problem, in one facet or another. Think, for example, of a corporation facing a liquidity crisis. Its leaders need to marshal epistemic expertise to discover the optimal resolution of loan covenants, issuance restrictions, and complex financial instruments — and the phronetic judgment of where short-term cuts will do least damage in the long run.

This brings us to the Covid-19 global pandemic and the challenges it has presented to leaders at all levels — in global agencies, national and local governments, and businesses large and small. To be sure, almost all of the world was blindsided by this catastrophe and early missteps were unavoidable, particularly given misinformation at the outset. Still, it has now been 10 months since patient zero. How can the devastation still be running so rampant — and have segued, unchecked, from deadly disease to economic disaster?

Our diagnosis, not as medical experts but as students of leadership, is that many leaders stumbled in the fundamental step of determining the nature of the challenge they faced and identifying the different kinds of thinking that had to be brought to bear on it at different points.

In the early weeks of 2020, Covid-19 presented itself as a scientific problem, firmly in the epistemic realm. It immediately raised the kinds of questions to which absolute right answers can be found, given enough data and processing power: What kind of virus is it? Where did it come from? How does transmission of it happen? What are the characteristics of the worst-affected people? What therapies do most to help? And that immediate framing of the problem caused leaders — and the people they influence — to put enormous weight on the guidance of epistemic thinkers: namely, scientists. (If one phrase should go down in history as the mantra of 2020, it is “follow the science.”)

In the U.K., for example, this translated to making decisions based on a model produced by researchers at Imperial College. The model used data collected to date to predict how the virus would spread in weeks to come (quite inaccurately, unfortunately). At the frequent meetings of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies there was one government official in attendance, and early on, he tried to inject some practical and political considerations into the deliberations. He was promptly put in his place: He was only there to observe. Indeed, members expressed shock that someone from the world of hashing out policy would try to have influence on “what is supposed to be an impartial scientific process.”

But the reality was that, while scientific discovery was an absolutely necessary component of the response, it wasn’t sufficient, because what was happening at the same time was an escalation of the situation as a social crisis. Very quickly, needs arose for tough thinking about trade-offs — the kind of political deliberation that considers multiple dimensions and is informed by different perspectives (Aristotle’s phronetic thinking). Societies and organizations desperately needed reliable processes for arriving at acceptable balances between factors of human well-being too dissimilar to plug into neat equations. Pandemic response was not, as it turned out, a get-the-data-and-crunch-the-numbers challenge — but since it had been cast so firmly as that at the outset, it remained (and remains) centered in that realm. As a result, leaders were slow to begin addressing these societal challenges.

What was the alternative? What should a great leader do in such a crisis? We believe that the right approach with the Covid-19 pandemic would have been to draw on all the relevant, epistemic knowledge of epidemiologists, virologists, pathologists, pharmacologists, and more — but to ensure that the scope of the problem was understood as broader than their focus. The tendency of the epistemic habit of mind is to go narrow, into pockets of science where it is possible to arrive at absolute, can’t-be-otherwise answers. The right approach would have been to factor those contributions into what was understood from the outset to be a sprawling, complex system of a challenge that would also call on holistic thinking and values-balancing decisions. If leaders had from the outset framed the pandemic as a crisis that would demand the highest level of political and ethical judgment, and not just scientific data and discovery, then decision-makers at all levels would not have found themselves so paralyzed — regarding, for example, mask mandates, prohibitions on large gatherings, business closures and re-openings, and nursing home policies — when testing results proved so challenging to collect, compile, and compare.

We admit we are painting with a broad brush here, undoubtedly some leaders balanced competing priorities and managed the calamities of 2020 more effectively than others. Our objective here is not to point fingers but simply to use the extremely prominent example of Covid-19 to underscore a fundamental but under-appreciated responsibility of leadership.

Part of your job as a leader is to frame the problems you want people to apply their energies to solving. That framing begins with comprehending the nature of a problem, and communicating the way in which it should be approached. Calling for everyone to weigh in with their opinions on a problem that is really a matter of data analysis is a recipe for disaster.  And insisting on “following the science” when the science cannot take you nearly far enough is a way to paralyze and frustrate people beyond measure.

This ability to size up a situation and the kinds of knowledge it calls for is a skill you can develop with deliberate practice, but the essential first step is simply to appreciate that those different kinds of knowledge exist, and that it’s your responsibility to recognize which ones are called for when. Aristotle’s efforts notwithstanding, most leaders haven’t thought much about realms of knowledge and what problems they can solve. Expect that to change as enterprises, and societies, take on increasingly complex and large-scale challenges — and leaders are increasingly judged on the thinking that goes into them.

This article was originally published at HBR.

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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