The Next Management: Creating Space for Reflection
By Johan Roos

Management practices should not be judged against rigid standards but guided through thoughtful reflection. Having recently explored this concept in my November 2024 article “The Next Management: Leading with the Long View,” [link], I want to share how this framework is evolving as a reflective tool rather than a prescriptive model—and how the Drucker Forum community is collectively advancing this work.

A Framework for Contextual Evolution

Transforming management isn’t about assessment against external benchmarks.

As Peter Drucker wisely noted, “Management is a practice rather than a science. Its effectiveness depends not on the refinement of its techniques but on the appropriateness of its application in the specific context.”

Rather, it’s about asking the right questions about current leadership practices and how they might evolve to become more “future-ready” within specific cultural, political, technological, and industrial contexts.

Much of mainstream management theory carries an implicit Anglo-Saxon bias, assuming that leadership practices can be universally applied regardless of cultural context. This standardization overlooks the rich diversity of effective approaches that exist globally. The Next Management framework actively counters this bias by acknowledging that organizational practices must be deeply rooted in their specific cultural, historical, and societal contexts to be truly effective.

The term “next” serves as an analogy for practices better suited to future challenges, not a fixed destination or model. This distinction is crucial: The Next Management aspires to help leaders in all types of institutions engage in meaningful reflection before they make necessary changes rather than conforming to standardized ‘best practice’ approaches.

The Seven Dynamic Balances: An Evolving Starting Point

Through our work with organizations across sectors, we have identified certain dynamic balances that serve as initial focal points for reflection. These seven principles represent our starting point—not a definitive framework—and will undoubtedly evolve as we gather diverse perspectives, examples, and even intuitive hunches from practitioners and scholars worldwide:

1. Innovation and Efficiency: How can organizations cultivate experimentation while maintaining operational excellence? How can mission-focused teams be empowered to experiment, or are they constrained by efficiency metrics?
2. Ecosystems and Single Institutions: Where do organizational boundaries end and partnerships begin? How is value created and distributed through ecosystem relationships?
3. Long-term and Short-term Focus: How do incentive systems balance immediate performance with long-term impact? What mechanisms ensure today’s decisions consider generational consequences?
4. Human Augmentation and Automation: How can technology amplify human capabilities rather than simply replace them? What unexpected insights have already emerged from human-AI collaboration?
5. Management as Art and Pure Science: When has intuition proven more valuable than data-driven processes? When does practical wisdom supersede data-driven processes?
6. Reality-grounded and Ideology: How can organizations remain pragmatic while pursuing ambitious aspiration? What feedback mechanisms allow adaptation when ideological circumstances suddenly change?
7. Self-renewal and Revolution: How might organizations continuously adapt without disruption? How can they transform while maintaining operational excellence?

These aren’t binary choices but spectrums along which organizations must find their own equilibrium, according to their specific contexts. The artful navigation of these balances—which sometimes manifest as creative tensions—is at the heart of next-era management practice. As we gather insights, examples, and alternative perspectives, we anticipate these principles will be refined, expanded, or even fundamentally reconceived to better capture the complexity of contemporary management challenges. 

A Collaborative Journey Forward

Our global ecosystem includes various groups and councils comprising renowned thought leaders, advisors, and executives who share our aspiration to evolve management thinking. We are now activating these groups to further develop The Next Management with more arguments (and counter-arguments), examples, and illustrations of emerging practices across different contexts.

Our approach includes several parallel initiatives:

• Expert Compendium: Assembling insights from management researchers and consultants
• Executive Working Groups: Gathering real-world perspectives from seasoned executives
• Experimental AI Interview Agent: Dynamically interviewing Drucker Forum participants to help define next-era leadership/management practices that align with the 2025 Forum theme “All Hands on Deck” [link]
• Drucker Salons: Hosting conversations in major cities to gather diverse perspectives and inspirational examples. Next one is in Munich April 10 [link].

This collective wisdom will be shared at the 2025 Drucker Forum [link] and beyond, influencing the future of management alongside the ideas of forward-thinking leaders and researchers presenting at the Forums. The project represents a longer-term “think-tank” commitment, with progress reports planned for each annual Drucker Forum, beginning in November 2025.

Context Matters

What makes the emerging The Next Management different from traditional frameworks is its inherent flexibility and assumption that context matters—cultural and regional differences; industry-specific challenges and opportunities; organizational maturity and history; technological capabilities and limitations, and so on. This contextual sensitivity means that the “next” practices for a European public institution may differ significantly from those of an Asian technology startup—yet both can benefit from the same reflective process.

The Next Management: A Five-Year Journey Through Annual Themes

Following Drucker’s holistic view that management encompasses both leadership and operational dimensions, we have established “The Next Management” as our overarching five-year thematic framework. Each annual Drucker Forum contributes a distinct chapter to this intellectual journey. The 2024 Forum explored “The Next Knowledge Work: Managing for New Levels of Value Creation and Innovation,” while the upcoming 2025 Forum theme “Next Era Leadership: All Hands on Deck” examines how leadership must evolve into a distributed capacity rather than remaining a concentrated power.

This progression of annual themes—each examining a critical dimension of management practice—collectively builds a comprehensive picture of management’s future. The annual themes serve as lenses through which we can examine specific aspects of the broader Next Management framework, while maintaining continuity in our intellectual exploration. This approach honors Drucker’s integrated view of management while allowing for focused examination of its constituent elements.

As The Next Management initiative progresses, we invite you to join this journey of exploration. Whether through participating in the Drucker Forum, attending a local Salon event, or engaging with our research, your insights and experiences are valuable contributions to this evolving framework.

The most dynamic organizations don’t seek to be judged—they seek to understand and evolve. Through collective reflection rather than standardized prescription, we can develop contextually appropriate management practices for the complex challenges ahead.

About the author:

Johan Roos is Executive Director of the Vienna Center for Management Innovation at Peter Drucker Society Europe and Presidential Advisor at Hult International Business School. This article builds on his ongoing work developing The Next Management framework.