Year: 2016

The Coming of the Entrepreneurial Kid
by Khuyen Bui

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Fifteen year ago, David Brooks described a specific kind of young people in an essay titled “The Organization Kid”. They were the highest achievers of American top universities. In his words, “their [schedules] sounded like a session of Future Workaholics of America: crew practice at dawn, classes in the morning, resident-adviser duty, lunch, study groups, classes in the afternoon, tutoring disadvantaged kids in Trenton, a cappella practice, dinner, study, science lab, prayer session, hit the StairMaster, study a few hours more… […] They are goal-oriented. An activity — whether it is studying, hitting the treadmill, drama group, community service, or one of the student groups they found and join in great numbers — is rarely an end in itself. It […]

Does Your Workplace Encourage Entrepreneurial Behavior?
by Sara Armbruster

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As leaders of our organizations we’re facing unprecedented challenges. The pace of work has accelerated. We’re constantly under a deluge of information and expected to rapidly shift between various contexts throughout the day. Our schedules are more fragmented and span multiple time zones. As a result, a loss of connection with people across our organizations is a frequent casualty. And we’re experiencing heightened demand to be more agile, innovative and growth-oriented. As the business world is changing, so should the way we lead. The concept of “The Entrepreneurial Society,” which I had the pleasure of deeply contemplating and discussing at the recent Drucker Forum, offers guidance for leaders today (though Peter Drucker saw it coming […]

“Do you have a value-creation playbook?” “No.”
by Curtis R. Carlson

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The Drucker Forum, led by Richard Straub, is one of the world’s most important conferences on innovation and entrepreneurship. It honours Peter Drucker, the genius who laid the foundations for modern management.  Each November it is held in Vienna, Austria where Peter Drucker was born in 1909.  Many of the world’s thought leaders and practitioners are there to share progress on these increasingly important topics. During my talk, “Creating an Innovative Enterprise,” I asked the 500 participants if their staff were given a value-creation playbook along with innovation training so they could be effective value creators.  Only 5 people raised their hands.  (My presentation is here:  drucker-forum.) This is a striking result given the quality of the […]

Seeing the World with Fresh Eyes
by Kenneth Mikkelsen

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In April 2012, Hans Joergen Wiberg presented an unusual idea at a startup event in Denmark. Wilberg, being visually impaired, had identified an opportunity to help blind people cope with everyday tasks. This relied on mobile phone cameras and connecting the blind with sighted volunteers. His simple idea caught on. Today, the Be My Eyes app pairs more than 30,000 blind people with nearly 400,000 sighted helpers globally. What if it were possible to equip modern leaders with a similar set of fresh eyes? What would they see? Could unexpected discoveries make them abandon current constructs of the world?   Leaders, like anyone else, are habitual beings that protect their worldview and the meaning they […]

Generation Direct – A New Breed of Entrepreneurs
by Joan Snyder Kuhl

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In his seminal book Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Peter Drucker said that “entrepreneurship, then, is behavior rather than personality trait.”  That entrepreneurship can be learned if, as he says in Harvard Business Review, one commits to “the systematic practice of innovation.”  The latest behavior that has become a hallmark of the 21st century entrepreneur takes place on social media.  With the meteoric rise of platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Kickstarter, Google+ and countless others over the past decade, it has transformed the way we think about life and business with regards to sharing information, connecting with consumers, networking with colleagues, collaborating on projects, and company branding. Programs like General Assembly and Stanford’s Design Thinking […]

Things that can’t last, don’t. Why economic change is a priority
by Simon Caulkin

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Brexit and now Trump are the delayed detonations of the unexploded bombs left behind by the Great Crash of 2008-2009. It seemed clear then that the financial meltdown was the logical end-point of a fundamentally flawed version of capitalism that had for ideological reasons inverted the real order of things, placing finance and shareholders as the centre of the universe round which the productive economy revolved, and patronisingly advising everyone else to wait for the benefits to trickle down. Brexit voters and the half of Americans who are worse off than they were in 1999 – and barely better off than in 1967 – have decided the wait is over. The explosion didn’t go off […]

The Entrepreneur in the Tech Economy
by Charles-Edouard Bouée, CEO Roland Berger

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There is no doubt: entrepreneurship has become ‘hip’ in almost all parts of the world. As a matter of fact, the ‘founding spirit’ went from Silicon Valley to Europe and Asia, grasping mature and emerging markets on its way. There are about 70 incubator structures in France today (10 in 2010) and nearly 50 in Germany (12 in 2010)[1]; startup funding has increased significantly in the last years (in the UK: from USD 2bn in 2013 to USD 5bn in 2015[2]). Governments and public organizations at all levels are heavily supporting the creation of new companies (from the French Tech initiative in France, to the Berlin Partner startup program in Germany, to the Creative Economy […]

Opera House: Entrepreneurial Blending
by Piero Formica

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The coupling of manufacturing and culture shows how far we can advance along the road towards an entrepreneurial society.   Do manufacturing and culture live in two separate and irreconcilable worlds—manufacturing in the world of things and culture in the world of ideas? Is manufacturing called upon to solve production problems, with culture pronouncing on ‘chief systems’ as in Galileo’s ‘Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems’? This is a shared vision of those who identify manufacturing with making and culture with thinking: the manual labour of artisans and technicians as opposed to the intellectual work of professors and scientists. As a result, this fault line fails to recognize that the factory is a culture […]