“their [schedules] sounded like a session of Future Workaholics of America: crew practice at dawn, classes in the morning, resident-adviser duty, lunch, study groups, classes in the afternoon, tutoring disadvantaged kids in Trenton, a cappella practice, dinner, study, science lab, prayer session, hit the StairMaster, study a few hours more… […]

They are goal-oriented. An activity — whether it is studying, hitting the treadmill, drama group, community service, or one of the student groups they found and join in great numbers — is rarely an end in itself. It is a means for self-improvement, résumé-building, and enrichment. College is just one step on the continual stairway of advancement, and they are always aware that they must get to the next step (law school, medical school, whatever) so that they can progress up the steps after that…

Kids of all stripes [today] lead lives that are structured, supervised, and stuffed with enrichment […] In short, at the top of the meritocratic ladder we have in America a generation of students who are extraordinarily bright, morally earnest, and incredibly industrious. They like to study and socialize in groups. They create and join organizations with great enthusiasm. They are responsible, safety-conscious, and mature.”

Much of that still resonates today, as I have seen in the college journeys of myself and many of my friends. We feel good about the kind of life we are going to lead, the skills we are improving daily and the promise of a better future. We work hard, sometimes too hard to the point of breaking down. We are then forced to decide what matters to us. We realize many pursuits don’t matter, and even for those that do, we have our limits. Then we learn self-care and rein in our commitments. We take yoga classes and exercise regularly to achieve work life balance, because being a professional student is demanding. We have to learn to seek and accept help.

Being in college is an incredible opportunity that we want to make the most of by starting with the end in mind. Yet it is not as simple as it seems: Anyone who has travelled knows we cannot jam everything in our bag. We want to pack the essentials and leave enough room for surprise. What we picture as “ends” may change quicker than we think.

The shift

Fifteen year later from David Brook’s article, I’m starting to see a shift. My college is still a place for high-achievers, but what counts as “achievement” has changed. Many are looking to do meaningful work and achieve organizational success. Asking people in college “What do you care about?” and you will find a wide range of answers. Asking “What does it look like in your life?” and you will soon admire many of these young people for their energy and dedication to the causes they pursue.

The questions we ask ourselves have changed from “What’s next?” to “What do I really want?” It is heartening to see more generation Y asking these questions. Many are questioning the existing structures, skipping what is the traditional menu and choosing the create-your-own-future path — the entrepreneurial journey.

In many higher education institutions, we see an explosion of many Entrepreneurial Leadership Study programs, business competitions, incubators and venture funds to support students pursuing this path. For the young people from elite universities, entrepreneurship is indeed the new black. On this, Peter Drucker remarks “The popular picture of innovators — half pop-psychology, half Hollywood — makes them look like a cross between Superman and the Knights of the Round Table.” While much has been said about this image, I think it does make a point: what Superman and Knights of the Round Table do have in common is that they are deeply engaged in their worlds. They are everything but bystanders.

There have always been entrepreneurs; those who look critically at current realities and act on the opportunities they see. But these were more exceptions than norms. As Peter Drucker in his essay “Principles of Innovation” said, if we want to make entrepreneurship an integral life-sustaining activity for organizations and society, we need to create the environment where it becomes a sustained practice. We need to shift the collective perception of entrepreneurship from desirable to necessary, for “giving people what they want isn’t nearly as powerful as teaching people what they need” as Seth Godin, the marketing guru, once mentioned. Not everyone wants to start her own endeavour, yet the entrepreneurial mindset has to be cultivated.

What does it mean for the individual, especially young ones like me?

One insight that Peter Drucker considers to be obvious but often ignored is that innovation is “hard, focused, purposeful work making very great demands on diligence, on persistence and on commitment.” As such, the making of the “Organizational Kid” is an important prerequisite for the “Entrepreneur Kid” for two reasons. Organization Kids are relentlessly goal-oriented, have high expectations, high performance and result. This drive makes them willing and able to do the work. Behind the glamorous image of Silicon Valley startups is the messiness of the entrepreneurial journey — the infamous “startup grind”. It is slow. It is work. And it is disciplined.

Where Organization Kids may fall short, however, is the ability to adapt, not so much because they can’t but rather because they haven’t allowed themselves to learn that while structure is crucial, it has to be fluid in order to respond to the needs and opportunities arising in the moment. An example I’ve seen it in me and others is the temptation to schedule everything to the minute, and then wonder why creativity has gone missing in our lives. It took me a while to learn to create space for more spontaneity in my overbooked schedule. I never look back, for this new way of life has allowed me the space to explore so many previously invisible opportunities.

If day to day plans can change so much, imagine how hard it is when people ask me about my goals, let alone a specific plan, for the next 5 years. I don’t know, and I don’t want to pretend to know. It is far more engaging and likely to yield results to stay in the Now. By definition, innovation is an inefficient process because we do not know where we are going. Yet instead of getting frustrated, we can choose to embrace its messiness while keeping our eye on the original Why.

The Organizational Kids will have to embrace some spontaneity over planning so they can learn to see and think for themselves. This might be the most challenging yet important skill to learn, and they will need the help of more experienced journeymen. It is too tempting to get lost in the doing, especially when the formula has always been proven to work. Yet it is worth remembering that the best thing about habits and practices is that they give us time in our otherwise messy lives. We use that time to connect to the truly new. Drucker again has warned us, “all that one can think and do in a short time is to think what one already knows and do as one has always done”. While I am in favour of the entrepreneurial “bias towards action”, maybe we also want to preamble it with a “bias toward perception”. How can we first see more clearly with ourselves and with others so that we can do what needs to be done?

I’m part of an exciting transition. The Organization Kid is still here, doing well, being more prepared than ever in history. And he is also evolving.

To paraphrase Peter Drucker’s question, will his successor be the Entrepreneurial Kid?

About the author:

Khuyen Bui won the Drucker Challenge 2015, and is a current senior at Tufts University. He is interested in organizational learning and development – how do people and groups come together, learn and evolve as well as how technology can help or harm that process.

As the business world is changing, so should the way we lead. The concept of “The Entrepreneurial Society,” which I had the pleasure of deeply contemplating and discussing at the recent Drucker Forum, offers guidance for leaders today (though Peter Drucker saw it coming in the mid-1980s). The notion of enabling employee ownership, responsibility and autonomy is key for driving innovation at any organization. Empowering others can alleviate many of the mental and physical challenges we as leaders experience daily.

Many leaders recognize the need to foster a culture of entrepreneurial behavior, and are looking for tools to help them do just that. I believe the workplace itself can help leaders lead better and, in turn, help others around them succeed. Think about your own work environment and ask yourself:

1. Does my office facilitate connections and collaboration?

Historically, executives were top-down decision makers. In today’s business world, exemplary leaders are those who are more connected and in tune with the organization. Doing so enables them to cultivate a positive corporate culture, help people do their best work and find the best ideas from all levels of the organization.

The office can also facilitate better connections between people and information. It can provide remote workers with a virtual presence similar to those who are physically present. We’ve all experienced a poor connection when calling into a conference call. A well-designed, technologically advanced conference environment can make that experience better for everyone.

To facilitate these types of collaboration:

• Provide casual meeting places like a lounge or café area that encourage people to come together and meet.
• Incorporate technology into these spaces so people can easily tap colleagues who may be located elsewhere by phone, video conference or other connection.

2. Does my work setting make my job easier?

When I first began my career, the corner office was a sign executives had “made it.” But think about the implications of a corner office; the physical space shuts the leader off from his or her colleagues and provides only a singular layout that doesn’t offer flexibility. The old model just isn’t cutting it today with the new challenges and intense distractions of today’s new world of work.

Many companies have made changes to their offices, including executive leadership spaces, to make them more open, transparent and flexible. For some leaders, this change is well-received. For others, this change is too drastic. It’s about striking the right balance. For example:

• Designate leadership workstations in or around a main thoroughfare within the office. This will create visibility and enable leaders to keep their finger on the pulse of the organization, so they can understand and recognize promising talent and ideas outside their direct reports, and mitigate inefficiencies where needed.
• Incorporate a mix of shared spaces which people can use depending on the type of work they need to accomplish.
• Provide spaces not just for maximum performance, but for rejuvenation and recovery, such as a private enclave for an executive or employee to decompress, rest, stretch or have a personal conversation during a micro “down moment” between meetings. This can improve the wellbeing of your employees and help them maintain focus and engagement.

3. Does my office encourage flexibility and autonomy?

I’m often surprised to find many leaders at major companies still have an owned workspace and rarely work from other spots within the office, other than to attend a meeting in a conference room from time to time. Often, this is because there aren’t many other desirable places for a leader to use, due to technology constraints, a lack of comfortable seating or other issues. When the workspace features a variety of work stations leaders can use effectively, they will be more likely to identify and use the right place for the task at hand. And, when other employees see leaders take advantage of this flexibility and autonomy, it allows them to do the same.

To provide your leadership team and employees with more choice and control over where and how they work:

• Create spaces that allow personalization and individual customization, instead of tightly enforced workplace standards.
• Provide a mix of types of work stations open to everyone: both open and private, large and small, options for sitting and standing, etc.

As approaches to leadership evolve in this new world of work, it’s critical the office also evolves to support these expectations, challenges and behaviors. It’s critical executives lead by example. This means stepping out of the corner office and moving around the space. In doing so, we enable an entrepreneurial culture, and can unlock the true promise of our organizations.

About the author:

Sara Armbruster is Vice President, Strategy, Research and New Business Innovation, at Steelcase. She oversees strategy creation and corporate business development, as well as Steelcase’s design research activity. Find her on Twitter: @saraarmbruster.

During my talk, “Creating an Innovative Enterprise,” I asked the 500 participants if their staff were given a value-creation playbook along with innovation training so they could be effective value creators.  Only 5 people raised their hands.  (My presentation is here:  drucker-forum.)

This is a striking result given the quality of the group, but it is typical of what we have discovered around the world.  Companies train their staff on project management, design-for-six-sigma, teamwork, leadership, negotiation, and many other topics.  But still not innovation.

As Peter Drucker said, “Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two – and only two–basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs.”  To do this, we need to move from the “what” of innovation to the “how.”  How to liberate creativity, how to create a transparent organization, and how to make high-value innovative results inevitable.

We are in the global innovation economy.  Technology improves exponentially fast, the world is hyper-competitive, and it has an abundance of major new opportunities.  Almost every area of business has endless opportunities for major innovations. Consider the financial industry and emerging technologies such as block-chain.  The waste in the financial industry is estimated to be trillions of dollars per year.  Eliminating this waste represents hundreds of opportunities for major new innovative companies.

But to develop these opportunities we must know how to innovate.  Today, relatively few professionals have those skills.  Big companies are going away at record rates, more U.S. companies are dying than being born, and almost all measures of innovative output are grim.

Typically, experience shows that 80% of the so-called “important” company initiatives create no value for the company.  Most university “tech transfer” programs lose money. Even the name is wrong.  Tech push does not work.  National laboratory directors around the world will admit in private that, despite their huge budgets, they are frustrated at the lack of useful results produced.  The waste of money and people’s potential is enormous.

Remarkably, as noted above, most companies do not use effective innovation practices.  Almost every CEO will say they do, but if you ask mid-level managers to describe their system, they can’t.  If they can’t, there is none.  That is what we find around the world – it is almost an iron rule.

That has started to change but only at the margin.  Agile and its derivatives are being increasingly adopted, but mostly for developing incremental innovations. NSF created I-Corps to teach students about value creation. Start-up incubators are promoting more rigorous practices.  And the US NSF and Singapore NRF are working toward use of better value creation practices.   But these efforts have still not broadly taken hold.

As we make progress we must also drive out bad ideas.  For example, I constantly hear, “To succeed at innovation you need to fail fast.”  That is a terrible idea. It is meant to be clever, but it gives no guidance about what to actually do.  The goal of successful innovation is to learn, search, and create fast; not fail fast.  That learning perspective defines the concepts and practices required for innovative success.  Every concept and methodology should be judged on whether it increases effective learning.

The innovative enterprise embraces a number of essential principles:

• Strategic Intent: Innovation is at the heart of the company’s strategy, with people, practices, and resources in place.
• Customer Focus: Peter Drucker said, “The purpose of a business is to create a customer.”  Most executives say their companies are customer focused, but they are not.  A test: “Does every business meeting start with the customer’s needs?
• Important Opportunities: The company works on important customer and market needs, not ones that are just interesting. Are metrics in place that define what “important” means?
• Value-Creation Playbook: To speed value creation, all employees understand and use core innovation concepts and processes.  One of the most important concepts is the “value proposition,” as described here.  Most companies have a confused or even wrong definition for this most important concept, which defines success from R&D, to business plan, and to sales. If you can’t present a compelling value proposition, you don’t know what you are doing.
• Rapid, Fervent Learning: Processes are in place to accelerate learning; those that slow it down are eliminated. We emphasize the use of Value-Creation Forums, which are recurring, multidisciplinary meetings where teams present their value propositions for critiquing (see Carlson and Wilmot, “Innovation“).  Note that these are not brainstorming meetings, project management reviews, or seminars, which are ineffective when the goal is the creation of new customer value.

The comprehensive use of these practices transformed SRI International in Silicon Valley from failing to becoming one of the world’s most successful enterprises, having created many tens of billions of dollars of new marketplace value through innovations, such as HDTV, Intuitive Surgical, and Siri on the iPhone.  Experience shows that the use of innovation best practice can enable improvements over 100%.  These practices are now being used by companies, universities, and governments around the world.  Some are moving from the “what” to the “how” of value creation and innovative success.

About the author:

Dr. Curtis R. Carlson is Founder and CEO of Practice of Innovation.  He works with global companies, universities, and governments on improving innovative performance. From 1998 to 2014 he was CEO of SRI International in Silicon Valley.  While CEO,  SRI became one of the world’s most productive innovation enterprises, having created HDTV, Siri on the iPhone, and many other world changing innovations.

Leaders, like anyone else, are habitual beings that protect their worldview and the meaning they derive from it. Peter Drucker understood that better than most people. In Innovation and Entrepreneurship he dedicated a chapter to incongruities, the mental gaps between perception and reality. Drucker saw these gaps as an invitation to innovate. At its core, entrepreneurship is at about exploring such opportunity spaces to create something new, something different.

We live in unsettled times of economic, technological and sociopolitical change. No company, industry or nation is immune to evolving cultures. What is in question is how we can use the current culture shift to replace outdated industrial practices. History teaches us that cultural innovation is triggered by the creation of a new story. It is through the evaluation of what we hold dear and how we want to live that we can create better practices.

Study after study on meaning, engagement and purpose expose a strong disconnect between what employees want and what organizations are capable of providing them. Organizations, bound by the weight of tradition, can only compete with startups, if they are willing to departure from the old rulebook. Their leaders will not only have to ask if they are doing things right or whether they are doing the right things. They must also continuously ask a deeper philosophical question: what is right? The intention of exploring this question is not to arrive at a definite answer, but to stay curious and keep experimenting.

A serious obstacle to organizational renewal is a reluctance to look beyond the demands of the moment and seeing the bigger picture. To stay relevant and create new value, established organizations will have to do things in a different and better way. It is, however, lazy thinking to assume that adaptation merely relates to embracing new technologies or changing business models and processes. Climate justice group Movement Generation offers a useful way to gain a broader perspective by thinking in terms of shocks and slides.

Shocks are acute moments of disruption that take us out of our comfort zone and change our certainties and carefully laid plans. The collapse of the global economy in 2008 was such an event. The earthquake and tsunami that rocked Japan in 2011 and caused the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster is another. The war in Syria and the subsequent refugee crisis also fall into this category.

Slides are incremental disruptions that play out over time. These are trends that we are aware of but find it difficult relating to. In this category, we find things like climate change, increasing inequality, technological advancements, urbanization and changing demographics. We know, for example, that the global population is set to hit 9.7 billion by 2050 and that more than a third of the world’s children will be living in Africa by that time. Artificial intelligence and virtual reality are other slides that will have a major impact on how we live, learn, work and, potentially, love.

Shocks and slides influence our values, perception and behaviors in profound ways. They break down our resistance to change and often serve as a catalyst for initiating obviously necessary reforms. Entrepreneurship is effective because of new applications of management that accommodate these changes, as Peter Drucker observed. In dealing with the shocks and slides, there are four shifts leaders of established organizations must focus on.

Mind shift begins with a willingness to adapt, by being open and ready to accept living with uncertainty. Acknowledging that there is more to a successful business than maximizing shareholder value is essential. It is by focusing on the pursuit of long-term goals, such as employee satisfaction, customer centricity and innovation that companies can leave a lasting legacy.

Skill shift addresses an urgent need for new capabilities. Skills like complex problem solving, critical thinking and creativity will be in high demand, as indicated in a recent study by the World Economic Forum. In an increasingly automated world there is an urgency to look beyond traditional skills and training. Companies need workers that can adapt to changing contexts by being self-directed and self-motivated learners with a systematic approach to personal knowledge mastery.

Behavior shift relates to how the collective worldview in organizations is manifested in daily actions and decisions. With changing customer and employee needs and demands the expectations of organizations keep rising while the tolerance with improper behavior keeps decreasing. Shifting behavior is one of the most challenging tasks because of vested interests. When top managers, for example, are handsomely rewarded for short-term gain rather than value-creating investments it takes the whole organizational culture hostage.

System shift means rethinking how organizations operate. Focusing narrowly on optimizing existing structures, processes and policies will not suffice. Power structures take on a new form with the emergence of networked ecosystems. As careers become more fluid and contractual, people outside the organizational boundaries will want to work with companies that serve a higher purpose, treat them with respect and offer unique learning opportunities.

Without a grasp of the interconnected relationship between the shifts, leaders cannot manage them successfully. To deal with them is neither a quick fix nor a one-time task. It is through systematic, practical application and learning that people build the capacity to live, not just survive, in such an environment.

Liberation from ignorance is a precondition for a truly entrepreneurial society to find its shape. Progress can only occur in imbalance. Any action, at least temporarily, must destroy equilibrium. Organizations based on standardization and compliance might root out some irregularities, but in pursuit of control, the appetite for exploration and experimentation is often lost. This explains why people who need certainty are unlikely to make good entrepreneurs and why the best entrepreneurs rarely work for others. The true quality of entrepreneurs is their willingness to challenge the status quo, to break conventional norms and find new paths.

Organizations don’t transform. People do. Too often executives think change can be engineered without putting their own skin in the game. “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself,” Leo Tolstoy said. Leaders must find a new sense of maturity within themselves to address the ongoing culture shift with greater clarity and intention. Those who insist on digging deeper trenches to withstand the new reality will eventually reach a point where they can no longer see the evolving landscape in front of them. As a consequence their organizations will become obsolete. Unfortunately, there is no app to make up for such blindness.

About the author:

Kenneth Mikkelsen is a writer, speaker, business advisor and learning designer. He is co-founder of FutureShifts and co-author of The Neo-Generalist: Where You Go is Who You Are with Richard Martin. He can be found on Twitter as @LeadershipABC.

Tata Consultancy Services, a leading global company focusing on IT services, digital and business solutions, completed a study “Social Media is Serious Business: A View from European Youth” about social media usage across Europe, where they surveyed 5,000 young people from 15 countries.  The results of the study and the #GenerationDirect campaign indicate that the importance of social media among young (i.e., Millennial) entrepreneurs cannot be overstated.  Thirty-three percent of this group utilize social media on a daily basis, with its uses ranging from hiring, client communication, networking, collaboration and skill development.  Specifically, 60% of young entrepreneurs indicate that social media helps them find freelance employees, and 41% are in touch with their clients via social media on a daily basis.  Furthermore, 62% of the sample use social media to grow their business network.  In essence, social media has become a fundamental aspect of growing and sustaining a business for Millennial entrepreneurs. As the theme of this year’s Peter Drucker Forum is called “The Entrepreneurial Society,” it is clear that a substantial portion of this society now exists on social media.

The emphasis on social media among young entrepreneurs reflects a larger generational shift regarding the demographical makeup of the global workforce.  Millennials (those born between 1982-1994) will make up 75% of the world’s workers by the year 2025 and are considered ‘digital natives’ as the first generation to come of age with the internet and smart phones.  For this generation, the use of social media is second nature and a natural part of their daily existence.  Beyond their comfort level with technology and their every-increasing presence at work, this generation has received wide spread attention in popular media for their perceived workplace behavior, stereotypically being seen as a job-hopping, entitled bunch.    However, in a study I recently co-authored, “Misunderstood Millennial Talent: The Other Ninety-One Percent”, we found that the stereotypes are largely untrue.  For the 91% of Millennials that are not financially privileged, only 10% are considering leaving their current job in the next year.  In fact, Millennials face intense financial pressure, with over half of Millennials needing to take out student loans to pay for their undergraduate education and 43% having loans totaling $40,000 or more. The overall student debt in the U.S. alone in 2014 was over $1.2 trillion. This generation is predicted for the first time in modern history to be worse off than their own parent’s generations. With such significant financial strain all over the world, many Millennials have turned to social media for help.  The Tata consultancy study indicates that social media helps young entrepreneurs have access to funding that perhaps would not have been available before these platforms existed.  Furthermore, young workers in general are using social media to improve their chances for employment and command a stronger voice in the world.

While the use of social media is clearly ubiquitous among Millennials, it can be easy to forget how new our reliance on technology still is.  The iPhone did not exist as recently as 10 years ago, Facebook did not exist as recently as 13 years ago, and LinkedIn did not exist as recently as 15 years ago.  Therefore, we are just scratching the surface on the various ways to capitalize on the business benefit of social media.  The room for innovation in this regard knows no bounds.  One recent area of growth has been digital learning.  According to the Tata study, 42% of young entrepreneurs in Europe believe that the skills which they acquire online will make them more marketable in other industries.  Additionally, the acquisition of new skills could make it easier for this generation to find what it is they are passionate about and find a job or career which reflects that.  In our study, 72% of Millennials indicated that Meaning and Purpose were very important to them in their work, which was higher than any other single factor. And how they define it is far from the superficial portrayed in the mainstream media. 71% say achieving the goals set before them and being seen as a valued contributor to their supervisor and teammates is a defining aspect of Meaning and Purpose.  If Millennials can leverage the tools that social media offers to align their career with their personal skills and interests, they will be more likely to achieve meaning in their work.  Tata consultancy’s study also reported that 50% of young workers have used social media to sign an online petition, indicating the potential for the Millennial generation to contribute to societal causes that they find meaningful through social media platforms.

To quote Peter Drucker once again, he said that “results are gained by exploiting opportunities, not by solving problems.”  Social media presents an enormous opportunity for young entrepreneurs to continue finding creative ways to build their brands, dynamically serve their clients, cultivate relationships with colleagues and consumers, and explore new frontiers within this young digital society.  Of course, not all social media behaviors are entrepreneurial, but the resources and platform it provides enables young individuals to act entrepreneurially in a way that was recently not possible.  This suggests that the current generation of digital natives could be the most entrepreneurial that we’ve seen to date.

Joan Snyder Kuhl

Joan Kuhl is the author of three books: Misunderstood Millennial Talent, Peter Drucker’s Five Most Important Questions, and The First Global Generation.  After 14 years in the pharmaceutical industry and building her thought leadership as a campus speaker, mentor and coach, Joan Kuhl launched Why Millennials Matter.  Why Millennials Matter is a training, research and consulting company based in New York City that focuses on raising awareness about the value of investing in Millennial employees and as consumers.  Joan leads workshops for executives, managers, and early career professionals to bridge the gap in communication and share strategies for stronger connection and collaboration. Her international speaking engagements and consulting have impacted leaders from over 60 countries.  Clients include Goldman Sachs, Eli Lilly, Johnson & Johnson, Discovery Communications, FINRA, Novo Nordisk, Viacom, Bayer, the NY Mets and Bristol Myers Squibb.  Joan is the Career Expert for Barnes & Noble College and host of the #Passion2Action podcast, which serves over 5.2 Million students across 725+ college campuses. She is a Research Fellow at The Center for Talent Innovation. She serves as a board member of The Frances Hesselbein Leadership Institute and Cosmopolitan Magazine Millennial Advisory Board.  Best-selling author Marshall Goldsmith named Joan as the “the Next Generation’s Top Executive Coach”.

Follow Joan on Twitter: @joankuhl Instagram: @WhyMillennialsMatter
2016 publications: Harvard Business Review and Leader to Leader Journal

The explosion didn’t go off in 2009 because an equally petrified left and right, despite rhetorical ferocity over marginal differences, united to assure their followers that despite the glaring flaws there was no alternative to the restoration of bankrupt ‘business as usual’, on both political and economic fronts. As in the 1930s (think Weimar Republic) it was a hopeless failure. ‘Quae non possunt non manent’  – things that can’t last, don’t. It’s the borrowed time of the previous consensus, based on the easy assumptions of social and economic liberalism, that has just come come to a noisy and vituperative end.

It’s been too glibly assumed that liberal social attitudes – to race, gender and sexual orientation, immigration, welfare, crime and punishment – which are now under such attack in the US and much of Europe, go hand in hand with democracy. Only up to a point. They are much more, perhaps only, sustainable in a healthy, balanced economy in which jobs, income and new resources funding some kind of social safety net, ease the pinch-points that aren’t caused by, but are blamed on, social liberalism. As we know to our cost, austerity is sooner or later death to tolerance and fellow feeling along with economic wellbeing, and best friends with resentment and anger over what’s felt to be lost, fear of the other and of what’s to come.

This is why real economic change is now both the priority and a possibility. As Paul Mason points out, ‘It is entirely possible to construct a humane pro-business version of capitalism without…austerity, inequality, privatisation, financial corruption, asset bubbles and technocratic hubris’ – provided we go beyond a glib determinism that sees the middle and working classes as victims of inevitable globalisation and technological advance, as if these were ineluctable forces of nature over which we have no agency. This is simply false.

It wasn’t abstract economic flows that caused the derivatives bubble that led to the Great Crash, but catastrophic management decisions, bent by unrealistic assumptions about human nature, about what companies are for, and how they should behave. In exactly the same way, it’s not globalisation itself that is (in part) responsible for stagnant wages and lack of good jobs, but what financialised, short-termist companies and managers have done with it. As former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis put it recently, globalisation in the shape of the international movement of goods, capital and people is one thing; globalisation as the ability of giant corporations to play hide-and-seek with international profits, arbitrage tax regimes and domicile, and lobby for international treaties allowing them to sue countries for actions that damage their profitability, is something that no one signed up to.

It’s no use economists vaunting globalisation and free trade as ‘goods’ in the abstract. They are only good if they are designed to be. Perhaps it’s that conditionality that J. M. Keynes, not noted as a narrow thinker, had in mind when he wrote in the 1930s: ‘I sympathise with those who would minimise, rather than those who would maximize economic entanglements among nations. Ideas, knowledge, science, hospitality, travel — these are things that of their nature should be international. But let goods be homespun wherever it is reasonable and conveniently possible, and above all, let finance be primarily national.’

Similar considerations apply to technology, perhaps even more so. The reason for pessimism over the current direction of technological travel does not lie in the nature of technology itself, nor in the belief that no other direction is possible. Precisely the contrary. It is that the world is experiencing the first great wave of technological advance to take place under a regime in which managers who make resource allocation decisions are enjoined, not to mention highly incentivised, to privilege investments that benefit shareholders (among them themselves), whatever the consequences for other stakeholders. This is why they favour low-risk efficiency gains over less certain but potentially much higher returns from more ambitious and expensive innovation (The capitalists’ dilemma). Consider in this context the ‘sharing’, or better, ‘gig economy’. If you thought it appeared by virgin birth out of the blue of cyberspace, think again. Following logically on from downsizing, outsourcing, offshoring and the end of career, task-based employment, or the end of the job, it is just the latest efficiency-driven, technology-aided manifestation of managers’ ongoing determination to bring market mechanisms into the company, in the (wrongly) presumed interest of shareholders.

Peter Drucker believed that corporations were far too important for the health of the wider society to be under the control of any one interest. He also believed that when institutions and beliefs outlive their founding assumptions, as they do, they become afflictions, threatening the whole of civil society with upheaval and unrest. Which is why innovation and entrepreneurship – ‘pragmatic rather than dogmatic, modest rather than grandiose’ – ‘are needed in society as much as in the economy, in public-service institutions as much as the economy’. No one can fail to see the relevance to the events of today. This year’s Global Peter Drucker Forum has as its subject ‘The Entrepreneurial Society’, its subtext the need for self-renewal drawing on the combined practical capabilities of state, civil and private sectors. Never has a major conference theme been so apt, or so urgent

About the author:

Simon Caulkin is a writer and editor who was The Observer’s management columnist for 16 years and also edited the UK monthly Management Today, and has contributed to the Economist, the Financial Times, amongst others, and is a Fellow of the think-tank ResPublica.

There are various changes to our current environment that, at least partly, explain these developments.

First, technological progress over the past few years has been huge in all areas of life: This development is fueled by more and more abundant capital, following the decision to pump more money into our economies in an attempt to resolve the global economic crisis of 2008-2009. Investment has become cheap and tech innovation has become the new Holy Grail. The first unicorns emerged in 2009. Since then, their number has climbed to over 180 worldwide, with a total valuation of more than USD 740 billion[3].

This is the ‘acceleration of times’ as described by the German philosopher Hartmut Rosa, since one can today borrow for almost nothing and become rich quickly. The possibilities to create new things seem endless.

Second, digitization and new forms of telecommunications make the world a huge (virtual) marketplace where the internet serves as a platform to exchange all kinds of products and services rapidly and non-bureaucratically. Transaction costs have become negative in many circumstances – i.e., it is very often cheaper to look for a particular service outside your organization than inside, with people even working free of charge in certain cases.

Lastly, the new technologies and tools allow consumers to increasingly take control – over authorities and corporates – because they have constant access to everything (e.g., via their smartphone, the ‘remote control of our lives’) and usually fewer constraints. Thus, we are slowly moving from a B2B & B2C to a C2B & C2C environment. This goes hand in hand with the rise of the generations Y and Z who have learnt to travel the world and want to be free and independent above all. As a consequence, the social contract is changing, too.

All of this leads to two interesting phenomena: 1) the emergence of ‘forever startuppers’, people who create and create again – regardless of whether they fail or succeed with their projects – rather than become employed; and 2) the development of so-called ‘rented execs’, independent contractors who move among organizations to provide their often specialized expertise. Both are fueled by the currently changing ecosystem – it’s cheaper for corporates, provides more flexibility and freedom for individuals, is less of a hassle and energy waste for both sides, and investors are hungry for new projects.

All of this can be easily explained by the concept of fear and greed, the main motivators that drive people in an increasingly VUCA world. Either you are greedy to make it and thus willing to take risks as an entrepreneur – or you fear to lose your job very soon to a robot and thus change out of necessity.

It implies new challenges and has consequences for all of us. Organizations of all sorts work together with individuals in networks and in alliances. Trust has become the new currency. Individuals themselves must become more creative, solution-oriented and take over the decision-making jobs. As a consequence of their newly acquired freedom and independence, they will also have to deal with increasing solitude and pressure to perform. Businesses must create a new sense of belonging for their non-employed staff and partners as part of the ‘Light Footprint Approach’ that implies an advanced organization, full use of technology and a more entrepreneurial corporate culture. Lastly, there are huge challenges for governments, too, ranging from employment market regulation to accommodate new mobility and flexibility needs, to the reorganization of social security and the transformation of their own administration in order to better serve the new demand.

In summary, we are making big progress towards the entrepreneurial society. However, this doesn’t automatically mean that we have solved all our economic problems.

In fact, we have created a large gap between the ‘ordinary’ people and the few ‘insiders’ who are becoming millionaires or even billionaires. This disparity is likely to grow further in the near future, and it will raise many questions of social inequality and justice for which we will have to find suitable answers. For instance, we will have to deal with massive waves of unemployment as technological innovations in hardware and software will require fewer staff – and the people who will be the most affected are those who are currently trying to save their money.

Hence, if we want to avoid what could potentially be serious consequences for our economies and people, it is time that we accept the change and start to actively shape our future by partly reversing the current trends.

For a start, interest rates must rise again. Therefore, we need the economic reforms which make this possible. We must also put a price on the use of private data; we need to manage new cybersecurity risks and define norms and standards for the use of artificial intelligence.

Lastly, we should put the focus of our attention back on the human being. This means that we have to ask ourselves more often: do we really need this new technological innovation? Will it help us lead a better life? Or are we just pushing it for the sake of creating something new and fascinating?

Joseph Schumpeter once qualified the entrepreneur as the representative of the ‘real economy’ – as opposed to the financial sector, which is supposed to provide support but not dominate the markets. My query, which I would like to put up for discussion at the Forum, is: are today’s (tech) entrepreneurs as real as they should be?

In this respect, I believe that each of them should be able to answer one crucial question: are you dead or are you alive? This means asking yourself if you will actually be able to reach the breakeven point with the amount of cash you currently own – or if you will need fresh money to continue. Having observed the scene closely for quite a while now, I suppose that many of the new start-ups currently aren’t truly “alive”…

About the author:

Charles-Edouard Bouée is the global CEO of Roland Berger and also responsible for the firm’s Asia business. He specializes in reorganization, post-merger projects and corporate improvement programs, disruptive innovations, new technologies and digital transformation.

[1] Source: Roland Berger, 2016

[2] Source: EY, 2016

[3] Source: TechCrunch, October 2016

Do manufacturing and culture live in two separate and irreconcilable worlds—manufacturing in the world of things and culture in the world of ideas? Is manufacturing called upon to solve production problems, with culture pronouncing on ‘chief systems’ as in Galileo’s ‘Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems’? This is a shared vision of those who identify manufacturing with making and culture with thinking: the manual labour of artisans and technicians as opposed to the intellectual work of professors and scientists. As a result, this fault line fails to recognize that the factory is a culture that can and should go hand in hand with academia and research centres: you will otherwise have two half-cultures that do not make a single, whole culture.

One need only look in detail at the staging of an opera —a seemingly extreme example of a cultural embrace— to see how much that vision is little more than a stereotype.

By setting aside their respective knowledge maps, manufacturers and lyricists prepare themselves for this ‘Grand Unification’ between manufacturing and culture, revealing interesting approaches for future growth influenced by path creators. Opera houses are a component of culture whose intangible assets—imagination, relational, reputational and entrepreneurial capital—are, invisible eye. These are assets that remain after the performance, when the theatre closes. These four assets have unique characteristics. They defy traditional accounting. Their value is realized when they are intertwined in complex relationships, such as with manufacturing. Unification between manufacturing expertise and the aesthetic demands of opera can lead to lyric opera productions enhanced by the application of complex digital technologies that connect people, processes, data and things. Equally, those in the audience could enrich their vision with augmented reality and communicate their emotions in real time. There is a digital innovation (MySmark, ‘Make your Smart mark’) developed by an Irish start-up company at the junction of psychology–marketing–computer science, which creates an ‘emotional tagging’. As such, customized profiles of members of the audience could allow theatres to investigate the personalities and subjectivities of those in the audience, assess their feelings and understand their priorities.

For the design and physical production of an opera, theatres could make use of 3-D printers. These and other new manufacturing technologies would offer experienced craftsmen, who create costumes, scenery, and lighting, opportunities to take their work further. Strong interaction with the world of manufacturing would enlarge the community of donors and investors in crowdfunding platforms. The eccentric profiles of ‘nerds’, who show a marked predisposition for science and technology, and ‘geeks’, who develop and enhance digital technologies using passion and experience, could complement the classic image of the opera connoisseur. Money of the many could give financial oxygen to theatres and shape an international community of opera lovers.

The opera, therefore, could become a non-elitist art form, with a very promising future. Current estimates by Bocconi, a private university in Milan, suggest that one Euro invested in La Scala Opera House generates two Euros in its supply chains and related industries. In the case of the Teatro Comunale di Bologna, a survey by Deloitte showed that for each Euro the Comunale receives in grants the community of Bologna gains benefits estimated to be around ten Euros, benefits to entrepreneurship and employment.

The long chain of activities required to stage an opera is full of opportunities that could be exploited by innovative start-ups that combine technology with the intangibles. That is why it would be necessary to promote and facilitate the role of the artist-entrepreneur and the technology-based artist who first explores the frontier that separates humans from machines and then creates interactions between entertainment and manufacturing. Beethoven was an artist entrepreneur; and in our lifetime there are technology-artists like Heather Knight, who works on theatrical robot performances. Here is a task for music conservatories and music academies which, as already happens in conservatories in the United States, should launch entrepreneurship courses for their students. As exemplified by the French programme Dix mois d’école et d’Opera, opera traces educational paths thanks to its connections with history, philosophy, literature, graphic arts, music, drama, and dance. Crossing cultural and national borders, opera houses multiply the economic impact of their performances. The ‘Grand Unification’ would increase its value.

About the author:

Piero Formica is the founder of the International Entrepreneurship Academy and a Senior Research Fellow at the Innovation Value Institute. He is author of The Role of Creative Ignorance: Portraits of Path Finders and Path Creators and Grand Transformation Towards an Entrepreneurial Economy: Exploring the Void.