Author: guest

Organizing for Simultaneous Innovation Capability – key findings from +1,000 companies
by Magnus Penker

Posted on guest7 CommentsPosted in 8th Global Peter Drucker Forum

After collecting and studying innovation data from over 1,000 companies in 62 countries, I’m often asked whether Small and Midsize Enterprises (SME) are more innovative and entrepreneurial than larger corporations. In times when the market dynamics, technology development, and diffusion are faster then ever, it is a natural question. So let´s dig into some key findings and see what we can learn.   All companies have a conscious or unconscious strategy, leadership, culture, capabilities, and competencies they use to improve and innovate business internally (e.g. processes) and externally (e.g. value proposition). According to Steve Coley (2009) the innovation work can be divided into three parallel Horizons, each one representing an S-Curve. The first Horizon 1 […]

Why ‘Modern’ Work Culture Makes People So Miserable
by Jeffrey Pfeffer

Posted on guest3 CommentsPosted in 8th Global Peter Drucker Forum

Today’s new deal at work reprises work schemes of the late 1800’s, plus a few meaningless perks.   Dan Lyons’ account of his time at the software company HubSpot describes a workplace in which employees are disposable, “treated as if they are widgets to be used up and discarded.” And HubSpot is scarcely unique: The description of Amazon’s work environment is just one of many similar cases. An increasing number of companies offer snacks, foosball, and futuristic jargon to keep employees’ minds off their long hours and omnipresent economic insecurity.   Whether that works, and for how long, is an open question.   Of course, in the new economy ever fewer companies hire people like Lyons as employees in […]

The surprising trick that can save your world
by Bill Liao

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

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

Posted on guest1 CommentPosted in 8th Global Peter Drucker Forum

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

Posted on guest2 CommentsPosted in 8th Global Peter Drucker Forum

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

Posted on guest1 CommentPosted in 8th Global Peter Drucker Forum

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

Posted on guest4 CommentsPosted in 8th Global Peter Drucker Forum

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

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

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 […]