Year: 2018

Humans in Control
by Ricardo Viana Vargas

Posted on guestLeave a commentPosted in 10th Global Peter Drucker Forum

Barely a day goes by without some new claim made on behalf of smart machines. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning are already changing our lives. In future they will automate many of our everyday tasks – from driverless cars to shopping drones. We take for granted many of these technological advances. We barely raise an eyebrow, for example, when our favorite stores target us with offers that seem almost telepathic in their accuracy, using matching techniques that rely on machine learning. The World Economic Forum (WEF) has named this era “the 4th Industrial Revolution” because many of the technologies available today (virtual reality, augmented reality, 3D printing, robotics, blockchain, to name a few) represent […]

Re-Humanising Work and Organizations Through Projects
by Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez

Posted on guest5 CommentsPosted in 10th Global Peter Drucker Forum

“The purpose of an organization is to enable ordinary human beings to do extraordinary things”, Peter Drucker Work has always been considered an essential part of being human: a means of providing for food, clothes, and shelter. In the wake of the social turmoil and rising unemployment which led to the February Revolution of 1848 in France, the French socialist leader Louis Blanc argued that human beings have “the right to work”, or engage in productive employment, and may not be prevented from doing so. The right to work was later safeguarded in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations General Assembly and recognized in international human rights law through its inclusion […]

Why the digital revolution and disruptive ecosystems will push us to leverage our humanity
by Michael G Jacobides

Posted on guest3 CommentsPosted in 10th Global Peter Drucker Forum

While much of the excitement in the business press considers the recent changes brought about by the digital revolution, what we’re really witnessing is the final act of a step change in how our economy can be organized. Guilds, exclusionary principles (even castes!) and stable industry definitions, which for centuries were the foundation of economic organization, have gradually given way to new, flexible ways of organizing. Technology has allowed people with cars and smartphones, mediated by the likes of Uber, to challenge taxis’ monopoly. Growth in “mobility services” has put a doubt over car ownership, and automobile OEMs have started to re-define themselves. Financial services are being transformed by fintech, and the adventuresome regulatory environment […]

It’s not Cambridge Analytica, it’s Humans traded on Personal Data Markets
by Sarah Spiekermann

Posted on guestLeave a commentPosted in 10th Global Peter Drucker Forum

Discussions about Cambridge Analytica and Facebook’s alleged involvement in election manipulation are all around us. But the two companies are not the core of the problem. Ever since the World Economic Forum started to discuss personal data as a new asset class in 2011, personal data markets have thrived on the idea that this might be the “new oil”of the digital economy as well as – it seems – politics. Indeed upwards of a thousand companies are now involved in a digital information value chain that harvests data from any activity we do online. It is not just Facebook and Google, Apple or Amazon that harvest our data for any purpose one might think of. […]

Management: Shaping the Future of the Human Dimension
Piero Formica

Posted on guestLeave a commentPosted in 10th Global Peter Drucker Forum

Practices akin to Bible scriptures, which require an exercise in logic to understand their meaning, are the distinctive feature of management as it has evolved during successive industrial revolutions. Humanism – a way of life centered on human values and a critical spirit – is forced within a “sacred” enclosure, and the human dimension of management is shrinking even more with the growing performance of a wide range of technologies that replace human beings in the adoption and implementation of managerial practices.   Staunch supporters of the claim that existing knowledge is the source from which most innovation stems lead the managerial enterprise. They are managers in the shoes of Ptolemaic “knowledgists” who search paths […]

Is Facebook causing the end of happiness?
by Vivek Wadhwa

Posted on guestLeave a commentPosted in 10th Global Peter Drucker Forum

For the past 30 years, most of us around the globe have welcomed modern technology with few questions and fewer reservations. We have treated each new product as a “solution” and paid little attention to its accompanying problems. The past six months, though, has seen a rapid change of opinion in the United States, as many in the technology elites have called GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon) and other tech giants to account. One of the most outspoken of Silicon Valley’s moguls, Roger McNamee, who was a mentor to Mark Zuckerberg, has published several articles highly critical of Facebook and has just launched a campaign, “Truth About Tech”, to educate the world about the evils of Big […]

What do we mean by “the human dimension of management”?
by Prabhu Guptara

Posted on guestLeave a commentPosted in 10th Global Peter Drucker Forum

“Hey!  Management is about nothing but the human dimension!” was the response of a friend when I told him that I was writing an article on this subject. From one point of view, that is true. Yet we all know that most discussion of “real management” – e.g. in a Board or business meeting, in an MBA or in Executive Education – focuses rather on finance, supply chains, and all sorts of other things. Clearly, the human dimension is only one dimension of management. In fact, it is usually considered a less important dimension than finance: isn’t finance the only thing that companies are required to report on, in most of the world? So perhaps […]

Can The Drucker Forum Establish The Human Dimension Of Management?
Steve Denning

Posted on guestLeave a commentPosted in 10th Global Peter Drucker Forum

In November 2018, the world’s leading management conference—the Global Peter Drucker Forum—will debate a profound question: “management—the human dimension.” A cast of eminent thinkers and executives will consider nothing less than the possibility of “a business reformation”— something analogous to Martin Luther’s call of 1517 for the Roman Catholic Church to abandon the sale of indulgences. The Drucker Forum invites us “to rethink how organizations, businesses, are actually run, why they are run, and what their purpose and role are in society.” The Three Responsibilities of Management In responding to this call, a good starting point is Peter Drucker’s 1954 classic book, Management, which formulated three responsibilities of management: assuring the performance of the institution […]