Author: guest

6 Signs You’re Living in an Entrepreneurial Society
by Efosa Ojomo

Posted on guest1 CommentPosted in 8th Global Peter Drucker Forum

In his landmark 1985 book, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, famed author and educator Peter Drucker wrote about an entrepreneurial society and its impact on economic development. “Entrepreneurship rests on a theory of economy and society,” he wrote. “The theory sees change as normal and indeed as healthy. And it sees the major task in society — and especially in the economy — as doing something different rather than doing better what is already being done.” What does it mean, then, to live in a society that is becoming more entrepreneurial? I see six major signs: 1. Innovation precedes regulation, not the other way around. In entrepreneurial societies, innovation always precedes regulation. In the United States, for instance, scientists and engineers in Silicon […]

Why Peter Drucker’s Writing Still Feels So Relevant
by Hermann Simon

Posted on guestLeave a commentPosted in 8th Global Peter Drucker Forum

In an era of rapid technological and social change, in which new management jargons seem to rise even faster than the disruptive startups that coin them, the career of Peter Drucker is perhaps as instructive as his writings themselves. Why do his writings remain so fresh and vibrant today? How did he avoid both authoring passing fads and jumping on others’ bandwagons? For one thing, he was a citizen of the world. Drucker himself lived in Austria, Germany, England, and eventually the United States. The upper middle classes of turn-of-the-century Vienna emphasized education, culture, art, music, historical consciousness, urbanity, and international openness, and Drucker learned from an astonishing array of his contemporaries — in his memoirs, […]

Startup Europe
by Nicolai Strøm-Olsen & Hermund Haaland

Posted on guest1 CommentPosted in 8th Global Peter Drucker Forum

Some European countries are becoming more entrepreneurial, but it is not without challenges. Europe needs to build better global ecosystems for entrepreneurship if we are to make the shift into a truly entrepreneurial society.   In Tallinn young people take part in a technological boom that has made Estonia the European country with the highest number of entrepreneurs per capita. Estonia is one of the few European countries that have transformed parts of its economy into a more entrepreneurial one, and it is starting to pay off. According to French economists at CEPII (Centre d’Etudes Prospective et d’Informations Internationales) Estonia will reach to the same level of living standard as the Nordic countries in only […]

A NEW CORPORATE CONTRACT FOR THE DIGITAL AGE
by Nicolas Colin

Posted on guest1 CommentPosted in 8th Global Peter Drucker Forum

A corporation is a contract between four parties with diverging interests: the shareholders, the executives, the employees, and the customers. The value created by the corporate entity is turned into wealth to be divided as laid out in that contract. In some cases, the shareholders get the lion’s share. In other cases, employees have the upper hand. The customers, too, can bargain for lower prices and a greater consumer surplus. It all depends on the industry as well as on surrounding institutions. The object of the corporate contract is to manage that balance of power so as to better align the interests of all parties involved, thus making the business more sustainable. For part of […]

Entrepreneurship is a mindset
by Vlatka Hlupic

Posted on guestLeave a commentPosted in 8th Global Peter Drucker Forum

It is commonplace to talk about the need for more entrepreneurial ways of running businesses, not least because we live in a highly unpredictable world. Not only are societies and technology constantly changing, but new business models are emerging. The ‘gig economy’ features services such as the Uber, and Airbnb who hire ‘gigging’ contractors, rather than conventional employees. And it is increasingly recognized that high levels of entrepreneurship are needed for survival in the wider economy. Steve Denning, in his blog in March, made a convincing case that the entrepreneurial firms are outperforming the firms still wedded to the practice of ‘maximizing shareholder value’ and narrow financial measures[1]. But what does an entrepreneurial way of […]

The Tragedy of the Commons: An Emerging Risk to the Entrepreneurial Society
by Johan Roos

Posted on guest2 CommentsPosted in 8th Global Peter Drucker Forum

Economist Willian Foster Lloyd described the notion of “commons” in 1833 in reference to the open pastures being damaged by self-interested herdsmen. Biologist Garreth Hardin used the term in 1968 to describe how population growth spoils our shared atmosphere, oceans and rivers. It is the over-utilization of the commons that inevitably leads to the tragedy, causing unhappiness, conflicts and ultimately extinction. Western society in the 21st century is clearly built on the notion of the commons – the very human right to be part of a prosperous culture that values intelligence, tolerance, peaceful lives, and progress. This commons makes up the foundation of our nations, as much as the air and the oceans, and it […]

Toward a society of entrepreneurs
by Joseph Pistrui

Posted on guestLeave a commentPosted in 8th Global Peter Drucker Forum

Quick. Name ten entrepreneurs. Those pulling from recent history might easily name Steve Jobs, Jack Ma, Robin Chase, Mark Zuckerberg. Those more historical might mention Henry Ford, Estee Lauder, Carlos Slim, or Coco Chanel. Top 10-50-100 entrepreneur lists abound with many overlapping names. Could it be that such lists are a huge disservice to entrepreneurialism? By tagging only a relative handful of elite “entrepreneurs”, have we demoted the endemic, innate — even genetic — trait shared by most, if not all, humans? Have we allowed the history of entrepreneurism to be defined solely by the few hundred people who practised it so well that profound commercial success became the capstone of their careers? What’s tricky […]

We Need to Expand Our Definition of Entrepreneurship
by John Hagel III

Posted on guestLeave a commentPosted in 8th Global Peter Drucker Forum

The great entrepreneurs of the last century — folks like Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, and Thomas Edison — spawned huge companies that were designed around a model of scalable efficiency. In that model the job of workers was to fit into their roles and perform tightly specified and standardized tasks in a highly reliable and predictable way. The employee society was born. Enormous wealth was created for the entrepreneurs who pioneered this way of organizing business, and enormous value was delivered to the marketplace. And most of us became employees. But the very model of organizing a business is becoming increasingly challenged by what I call the Big Shift — long-term forces, such as the rise of […]