Anyone knowledgeable about management is well aware of the power of “disruptive innovation”—Clay Christensen’s term for how long-established and well-resourced enterprises can be upended by creative competitors focused on delivering more value to their customer bases. What many do not yet recognize, however, is that management itself—the whole set of rules and tools by which organizations are professionally run—is also in the process of being disrupted.[…]
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What will be involved in enabling the next management to become a noble calling that helps create a worthy society? In his HBR article of June 2024, Richard Straub suggested that it should include at least seven aspirations, as shown in Figure 1.[…]
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More and more of the innovation opportunities and challenges in management today, from sustainability through to leveraging the potential of AI, require a range of capabilities and knowledge that no company has in-house today. As Frank Walter Steinmeier, President of Germany put it during the Covid pandemic: “No single entity covers the medical, economic, and political elements required to produce a vaccine for all.” Likewise, no single company has all the knowledge in-house to make buildings sustainable, enable the whole spectrum of industry to economically shift to renewable energy, move from vehicles to mobility solutions, or to integrate AI effectively into the lifeblood of organisations, to name just a few of today’s opportunities for both profit growth and societal benefit.[…]
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Allegiance to Artificial Intelligence lies in the code we have crafted. This is both its strength and its peril.
AI as we know it is mimicking a form of intelligence, but it is hollow—it lacks a moral core. Indeed, for decades, we’ve conceived and trained machines to calculate outcomes, not to uphold principles. Leadership in the next era demands that we fix this.[…]
On Wednesday November 13, 2024, “The India Way” workshop took place in Vienna as part of the Drucker Forum and in collaboration with the Living Machine Institute and Invest India.
Echoing Peter Drucker’s vision of the “Next Society”, Richard Straub, founder of the Global Peter Drucker Forum, has launched an ambitious initiative called “The Next Management”, aimed at reframing management for the 21st century.[…]
As a guest at the 16th Global Peter Drucker Forum, I had the honor of talking about recent developments in the global political landscape and their effects on society and the economy. The era of globalization as we have known it has ended and, unfortunately, we are not only being confronted with a new geopolitical situation, we must also simultaneously face the challenges of climate change and increasing biodiversity loss. In other words, globalization is over; global problems, however, will become ever more pressing. Against this background it is clear that we will only be able to feed and provide health care for a growing world population if we find new, uncommon ways to collaborate.[…]
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Thinking across different time horizons is a crucial skill for driving impact and sustainable value creation. We can choose our own perception of time to exercise our long-term thinking muscles, to bring our future vision into focus, and to spot opportunities.
Our expanding liminal present
Today, few can focus beyond the next news cycle. But looking farther into the future is necessary for survival. As the world will be radically transformed over the coming years, there is no alternative but to understand what key features to look out for, what fragments of the future are emerging today – sometimes prematurely and unannounced. Thinking across different time horizons provides an opportunity to explore these possibilities.[…]
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In Alan Turing’s seminal paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”, he posed the now-famous question, “Can machines think?”—an inquiry that laid the groundwork for exploring the cognitive potential of machines.
Today, as we witness AI systems moving beyond narrow tasks into increasingly autonomous roles, this question evolves into a new, urgent line of inquiry: “Can machines act with integrity?”
Just as Turing’s work invited us to ponder the boundaries of machine cognition, the rise of advanced AI compels us to ask if machines can be equipped to uncompromisingly act ethically and responsibly.[…]
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When we talk about the future of the knowledge economy, the first question that comes to mind is whether we should still call it that. Relatively soon, all knowledge, expertise, and the know-how to apply them – accelerated by the combined explosion of AI and robotics – will reside with machines.
We tend to downplay the impact of AI on work, focusing on the automation of rote tasks while humans would focus on those that demand “human qualities” like creativity and empathy. That’s comforting; it helps us overcome the fear of the potential loss of jobs. Fear is a natural reaction.[…]
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“Managers probably need financial and accounting, marketing and strategic skills more today than they ever have done. But they also need something else. They need grounding in the messy realities of the human condition, an understanding of politics and culture and an awareness of the historical forces that have shaped the world in which we live. …and they need role models from whom to learn.”
(John Hendry)[…]
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