Tag: Global Peter Drucker Forum

Drucker our contemporary
by Stefan Stern

Posted on guest2 CommentsPosted in 4th Global Peter Drucker Forum

Economic crisis, political uncertainty, the dangers of extremism: these things haunt us today just as they shaped and influenced Peter Drucker many decades ago. Out of the tumult of the 1930s and 40s emerged the steady voice of the original and best management guru. What would he be saying now?   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” […]

The Gaming of Games
Roger L. Martin

Posted on guest3 CommentsPosted in 4th Global Peter Drucker Forum

I have to admit that the thing I like most about Peter Drucker is how often he said things that were dismissed at the time as improbable, extreme or even wacko and 25 years later were considered so obvious that they are assumed to have always been the case. In 1954, he told managers that they should sit down with their direct reports every year and establish objectives by which they will be managed.  Sounded farfetched in 1954 but now you would be considered incompetent if you didn’t manage by objectives. In 1966, he told the business world that its important players would soon be ‘knowledge workers’ not the physical workers that it was used […]

Shareholder Value – a theory that changed the course of history – for the better or the worse?

Posted on rstraub8 CommentsPosted in 4th Global Peter Drucker Forum

During the past 30 years, “maximizing shareholder value” has unquestionably become our dominant economic creed with a vast impact on management practice.   Michael Jensen and William Meckling, authors of the famous 1976 Journal of Financial Economics article “Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Cost and Ownership Structure,” can rightly claim that their paper changed the way corporations have operated: how they’ve been governed, how their top executives have been compensated, what strategic priorities they’ve set, and how they’ve dealt with their human resources.   One might argue, in short, that the article has had a transformative effect on a broad scale—so much so that we should ask whether the recent worldwide economic crisis […]