The surprising trick that can save your world
by Bill Liao

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Sudden and massive awareness of intractable problems is an effect of the Internet information age. Whether this is a benefit or a hazard is difficult to answer.   Where we might agree is that we are sharing this planet and so global challenges affect our personal world. For instance everyone in Europe is now affected by the refugees’ influx and while the immediate cause appears obvious and intractable the underlying issues of poverty and unrest driving the violence are addressable.   We tend to view threats through simple lenses and it takes a deeper understanding of the problem to have an impact when the threat is global. Even with the necessary deep thinking and evidence […]

Entrepreneurialism and Society: Addressing the Broken Bond
by Prabhu Guptara

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Entrepreneurialism and society need to relate wholesomely if either is to flourish. In reality, the relationship is broken, in at least three different ways.   First, most countries around the world are not committed to supporting entrepreneurship[i]. Such support requires alignment between politics, law, the monetary system, economics, education, finance, and the whole national culture. The USA, historically one of the friendliest to entrepreneurs, is rapidly becoming frostier for them[ii].  In many countries, entrepreneurs are regarded as a threat to the governing elite, being dispatched to prison if they are “too successful”.  In other countries, such as China, any entrepreneur has to toe the line of the ruling party.  Even then, an entrepreneur’s success may […]

Mindset, mechanics and measures
by Alex Adamopoulos

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The quest to better understand how our business society advances and adapts in a digital age is a common conversation these days. We tend to compare large, global organizations to the nimbler, more agile entrepreneurial ones as a way of saying that these younger businesses and their respective models will wildly disrupt the way we have always done things. To some extent, this is true. We see many traditional business models being subverted by clever uses of technology and finer detail around customer experience.   That said, I have yet to speak to the CEO of a large organization who has not told me that they’re not doing similar things. They’re taking financial risks in […]

How Close Are We To An Entrepreneurial Society?
by Steve Denning

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In his book, Innovation and Entrepreneurship (1985), Peter Drucker argued that the US was experiencing “a profound shift from a ‘managerial’ to an ‘entrepreneurial’ economy.” This had been made possible by “new applications of management…and above all, to systematic innovation.”[1]   Entrepreneurial management, Drucker wrote, requires very different managerial practices including (1) focusing managerial vision on opportunity; (2) generating an entrepreneurial spirit throughout its entire management group and (3) systematic listening to and interactions with the staff.[2]   “Today’s businesses, especially the large ones,” Drucker wrote in 1985, “simply will not survive in this period of rapid change and innovation unless they acquire entrepreneurial competence….Existing businesses will need to change, and change greatly in any […]

Wobbling Towards Entrepreneurial Society
JC Spender, Kozminski University

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As the 2016 Drucker Forum Abstract notes: entrepreneurship is “an activity once regarded as peripheral, even suspect, but now ‘cool’ and celebrated by politicians”. Entrepreneur, a charming word borrowed from old French, came into economists’ discourse around the time Adam Smith was writing. It has a positive uplifting feel, entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship are ‘good’ – who is going to say we need less of them? But the term carries burdens that loom as our global socioeconomy changes. First, since the time of Cantillon (who used the term in its modern business-oriented sense in 1732) business has become vastly more important, pushing back against lineage, religion, and political maneuver as sources of social and economic power. […]

What is an Entrepreneurial Society?
by David Hurst

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What is an entrepreneurial society? I think of it as a socio-economic system that is capable of constantly renewing itself. It retains its identity by constantly recycling and restructuring its elements. It achieves that elusive quality that Peter Drucker looked for in organizations throughout his career – a “balance” between continuity and change, order and movement.   For basic illustrations one can turn to nature. Ecosystems like temperate forests offer an example that may be paradigmatic; the innovative process begins in an open patch, where there is equal access to sun and rain and space for small-scale experimentation. We call the pioneers that come into this patch “weeds” – fast-moving organisms with simple structures, suited […]

The Promise of the Entrepreneurial Society
From Secular Stagnation to Secular Prosperity
by Richard Straub

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A defining moment   It may be that we are living a defining moment for the future of capitalism and for humanity. For the last 200 years entrepreneurial prowess enabled by financial capital has powered a long surge of economic growth. Over the major innovation cycles, the capitalist system has been resilient enough to absorb the effects of the crashes caused by pure speculation and turn them to its advantage. Production capital took the lead over financial capital and real value over paper value, as Carolta Perez has so brilliantly demonstrated.   Fast forward to today, and the picture is not so happy. Financial capital is in the driving seat. Eight years on, the world […]

Reflection on Global Drucker Forum 2015: Work, human potential and technology
by Khuyen Bui

Posted on guestLeave a commentPosted in 7th Global Peter Drucker Forum

“Global Peter Drucker Forum is not so much about better answers as it is about better questions” — Richard Straub   Any discussion about technology invariably has some forms of “What is in the future?” question. What changes will technology have in our lives and professions, how should we be prepared, what will happen to us?   The attitude behind these questions must be a proactive one. There is a big difference between “concern” and “worry”; only the former allows for practical actions. As Peter Drucker said, “The only way to predict the future is to create it”. Technology co-evolves with humans. For anything humans do, we can imagine machines replacing us: the ability to judge and make decisions, […]