Category: 5th Global Peter Drucker Forum

How Drucker Thought About Complexity
by John Hagel III

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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.   […]

Making Management as Simple as Frisbee
by Steve Denning

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This is a cross-post from the HBR Complexity Serieswritten by Steve Denning, and is one of the perspectives relating to the 2013 Drucker Forum Theme (“Managing Complexity”).   Complexity is not a new condition. While it’s true that many aspects of life have become more densely connected and unpredictable, the fact is that our world is inherently complex. Most of the environments we move in and tasks we perform require us to deal with interdependent and dynamic phenomena.   Consider (as economists Andrew Haldane and Vasileios Madouros recently did) the seemingly simple task of catching a Frisbee. It requires the resolution in real-time of two infinitely variable factors: the Frisbee’s trajectory and the catcher’s own […]

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 higher education requires a new underlying philosophy
Liviu Nedelescu

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Futurists, professors and entrepreneurs seem to agree: the higher education establishment will be disrupted in the near future. Thomas Frey foretells the collapse of over 50% of colleges by 2030 while Clay Christensen proposes higher education to be just on the edge of the crevasse. The culprit responsible for the disruption in their view? Technology, or more precisely the increasing availability of online learning to which Michael Saylor would add the proliferation of mobile devices.   My view? There is more to the story than technological disruption. To understand such subtleties, one has to look at the underlying philosophy of education.   As knowledge is fast becoming a commodity, the very business model of traditional […]

It’s too complex!
by G. Koch

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I can’t remember any conference which I attended in the last few years where at least in one major speech the subject of complexity was not prominently addressed. There is no longer any discussion on the future of society, economy, finances, education or science in which the contributors do not admit that the interrelationships and dependencies have developed towards a size, a level of opacity and multi-dimensionality which can only be characterized as complex – not just complicated. Being complicated is not being complex; it means that a certain effort is needed to solve a problem, but it is manageable anyway. Not so a complex problem.   Everybody knows what complexity is because everybody has […]

Why Managers Haven’t Embraced Complexity

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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) […]

Open Innovation – A Powerful Movement Takes Shape

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As a co-founder of the Open Innovation Strategy and Policy Group I remember well the days when we had great difficulty to make ourselves understood. What is open innovation all about and why should anybody care? Some may even have thought that it might just be another buzz-word and management fad  –  we have indeed seen a lot of those passing by. Today, five years on we know  better.   What started as a small creek, invisible to most has become a powerful torrent. This is not just wishful thinking  –  the 2012 IBM CEO survey conducted with more than 1 700 business leaders in 64 countries contains compelling evidence: only 4 percent of the […]

Managing Complexity – Invitation to join the Conversation

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“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 […]