Tag: Peter Drucker Society

Managing Complexity – Invitation to join the Conversation

Posted on rstraub4 CommentsPosted in 5th Global Peter Drucker Forum

“We are at the beginning of a period of extreme flux, of extreme change and great competitive pressure in which traditional ways of doing things, traditional products, traditional processes will be challenged on all sides.”   When Peter Drucker uttered these words to a group of IBM executives, new complexities were tripping up the world. It was 1955.   In the more than half a century since, of course, the level of complexity has only increased across all of our institutions – political, economic and social. Indeed, as we move further into the 21st century, the complexity curve seems to be growing exponentially. The notion of achieving neatly laid-out objectives through systematic planning has become […]

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 […]

Can Europe Become an Entrepreneurial Society?

Posted on rstraub4 CommentsPosted in 4th Global Peter Drucker Forum

In his landmark book Innovation and Entrepreneurship, published in 1985, Peter Drucker described the tectonic shift that he perceived in its early stages—the move from an employee society toward an entrepreneurial society. This shift was, and still is, being driven by unstoppable forces such as changing demographics and ever-hastening advances in information and communication technology.   As Drucker lays out what this new society should look like, he builds upon another great thinker of Austrian origin, Joseph Schumpeter, who had positioned the entrepreneur at the heart of capitalism – as the life force of a market-based, competitive, dynamic and wealth-creating economy. The question for Europe is: Has this sea change happened? Have we seen enough […]