Tag: HBR

How Drucker Thought About Complexity
by John Hagel III

Posted on guestLeave a commentPosted in 5th Global Peter Drucker Forum

This is a cross-post from the HBR Complexity Serieswritten by John Hagel, and is one of the perspectives relating to the 2013 Drucker Forum Theme (“Managing Complexity”).   Throughout his life, Peter Drucker strived to understand the increasing complexity of business and society and, most importantly, the implications for how we can continue to create and deliver value in the face of complexity. I have long been influenced by Drucker’s work. In the 1960s and 1970s, he was already anticipating some of the implications of the Big Shift just beginning to emerge: the transition to an information economy, the centrality of knowledge work, and the transformative impact of digital technology on all types of work.   […]

The Mongrel Discipline of Management
by David Hurst

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This is a cross-post from the HBR Complexity Serieswritten by David K. Hurst, and is one of the perspectives relating to the 2013 Drucker Forum Theme (“Managing Complexity”).   Humans engage with their world in two reciprocal ways: firstly as passionate participants and secondly as detached observers. As managers we cycle between these modes constantly. It’s the mark of a great manager to be able to judge, in a complex situation, when and how to use each of them.   Detached observation requires a certain maturity. Consider that we are born into the world immersed in context. We are embodied organisms, fine-tuned by evolution to garner cues to action from our surroundings. We pay attention when […]

Why Managers Haven’t Embraced Complexity

Posted on rstraubLeave a commentPosted in 5th Global Peter Drucker Forum

Nobody would deny that the world has become more complex during the past decades. With digitization, the interconnectivity between people and things has jumped by leaps and bounds. Dense networks now define the technical, social, and economic landscape.   I remember well when the idea of applying complexity science to management was first being eagerly discussed in the 1990s. By then, for example, scholars at the University of St. Gallen had developed a management model based on systems thinking. Popular literature propagated the ideas of complexity theory – in particular, the notion of the “butterfly effect” by which a small event in a remote part of the world (like the flap of a butterfly’s wings) […]