“Global Peter Drucker Forum is not so much about better answers as it is about better questions” — Richard Straub

Any discussion about technology invariably has some forms of “What is in the future?” question. What changes will technology have in our lives and professions, how should we be prepared, what will happen to us?

The attitude behind these questions must be a proactive one. There is a big difference between “concern” and “worry”; only the former allows for practical actions. As Peter Drucker said, “The only way to predict the future is to create it”. Technology co-evolves with humans. For anything humans do, we can imagine machines replacing us: the ability to judge and make decisions, to analyze and synthesize information, or even to feel and convey emotions. Somebody will, or are already making these once sci-fi ideas happen.

Let us not forget in the midst of so many talks about “Technology”, the greatest invention for humans has been language — it allows humans to exchange ideas, coordinate actions and develop cultures. Cultural evolution has been faster than the biological one. While it is true that the biological makeup of our human brain hasn’t changed that much since we were all in Africa, the environments have drastically changed. As mentioned by Marten Mickos (CEO of MySQL), the waiting time in every conceivable services of every industry from transportation to healthcare to education has reduced. It also means that we are able to create and iterate on prototypes much quicker. As feedback loops tighten, we can learn exponentially faster as individuals and and even more so as communities. The latter is crucial because it binds societies together, especially in our current fractured world of clashing ideologies and dogmatism. This reminds me of Henry Mintzberg’s quote: “If you want to know the different between community and network, try asking your friends on Facebook to clean your house”. One responsibility for our future is then clear: we need to understand and leverage on the power of networks to strengthen learning communities.

Another message from the forum is that we should not get too distracted by technology and forget the essential challenge: to continually find and define ourselves, regardless of our time. Management should always start with that realization. We must focus on being human and on the human beings around us. I hope the terms “human resources”, “human capital” or “human assets” should be out of the management lingo soon. They all imply being “used”, or at best “renewed”. Why don’t we call it “human potential”? Potential is limitless yet can only be realized through intentional work and effort; it is promising but unguaranteed. The purpose of any kind of leadership is then to realize such potential and thus collectively shape our futures together.

Another dominant theme of the conference is the need to rethink the nature of work. I believe one reason for the theme for Drucker Forum next year being “The Entrepreneurial Society” stems from the question of engagement at the workplace.

Jim Keane, CEO of Steelcase, mentioned the 2015 Gallup study that 87% of employees report they are disengaged. We have designed the workplace with the alarming assumption that most people don’t want to work, and that we have to use incentives (either carrots or sticks) to motivate them. Carrots and sticks are, however, so 19th century ,Industrial Revolution. They no longer work in the knowledge and creative economy of the 21st century, and as long as managers still hold on to that assumption, they won’t survive. How can we inspire people around us when we ourselves are not even inspired?

That grim state of disengagement at work is why we need to foster an entrepreneurial spirit. Few things are as engaging as being part of a new and meaningful endeavor. From startup founders, social entrepreneurs, intra-preneurs, to solo-preneurs, those with such spirit are the boldest, most energetic and creative people. They will set the standard for the next generations for what real engagement at work looks like by setting their own examples.

Having an entrepreneurial spirit doesn’t necessarily mean becoming entrepreneur – or at least the image of all-consuming start-up founders we are used to. In fact, it can be quite draining to surround oneself with this group too often. Some people are more inherently driven to create solutions, while others tend to muse on the problems. Each of us in fact operates everyday by switching between these two modes of being. The task of self-management is thus to balance between the two extremes: mindless actions and actionless mind. I once heard of the “Cry test” to decide if one should pursue an entrepreneurial lifestyle: only when I cry about a problem that I should commit to solving it. An extreme test but not without some truth, given how lonely, tough and all consuming the journey will be.

Regardless of which path to choose, a big lesson that I am learning is that in order to do anything truly good, fear must be explored and transformed into aspiration. There is a great deal of people with the Fear of Being Mediocre syndrome, who think that their lives must shine and that they must be different from the rest. Alas, while the spirit is laudable, worrying too much about being mediocre is a surefire way to become one. What is the antidote then? I’m reminded of Drucker again: focus on contribution and being consistent with one’s effort. The first mantra steers our vision on the right path, and the second ensures we keep moving. They have always been and will continue to be the key to meaningful and valuable work.

How can I bring these ideas into my daily life? By practicing a habit of retreat and reflect often (especially when our smartphones keep vying for our attention) and taking deliberate actions. “Follow effective actions with quiet reflections, and there will come even more effective actions”, as Drucker once said. Each of us has to be both mountain and cloud, always grounded in purpose while floating with changing realities.

About the author:

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

Some people don’t get the idea of the plural sector, perhaps because it has been so marginalized by the great debates over left versus right—private sector markets versus public sector governments. Where to put the plural sector, comprising all these community-based and other associations that are neither public nor private? NGOs, clubs, churches, unions, mass movements, social initiatives, and so on? Wolfgang Műller, Chief of Operations of the City of Vienna, who had read my book about Rebalancing Society, got the idea—in principle. Then he experienced it in action.

I met Wolfgang last Wednesday when he organized a workshop I did with his colleagues at the City of Vienna, before I attended the Global Drucker Forum in that city. He recounted a story about how this understanding in principle suddenly became an understanding in practice. I asked him to write his story down.

WM:  On Friday September 4, I was sitting in my office in Vienna City Hall when I learned on twitter that refugees from Syria and Afghanistan, some with children, had decided to walk the several hundred kilometers from Budapest to the border of Austria, determined to get to Germany, their land of hope.

Suddenly, within hours, Vienna’s train stations became organized as hubs for thousands of refugees—buses in, trains out. In such a situation medical care, food, and overnight shelter had to be organized, usually in association with NGOs such as the Red Cross.

While my staff was coordinating the crisis management network, I needed to get a hands-on impression of what was happening. I went to the new central station, where I saw all kinds of people helping with translation, providing medical aid, and distributing blankets, clothing, and food. Among them was a group wearing shirts emblazoned with “Sikh Help Austria”; they were dishing out warm meals from big pots that they had brought.

Something truly amazing had happened. Citizens young and old, some the children of immigrants or themselves earlier immigrants, decided to take action. They asked themselves what in Henry’s book is called “the Irene question”—“What can I do?”—and here they found an answer. Using social media, they organized themselves into a sort of citizens’ start up, dedicated to helping the refugees. They called it The Train of Hope (@trainofhope).

Here are some statistics: 180,000 meals were served in September alone, by 350 volunteers every day, including about 5,000 warm meals by Sikh Help Austria. (These statistics are from what could be called the management accounting “department” of that Train of Hope! Even that sprung up, as if from nowhere.)

Now, when The Train of Hope asks via social media for bread or bananas, the items usually appear within the hour: hundreds of kilos. Social media entries are updated regularly and the posts are now followed avidly by about 300,000 Austrians.

At first, we in the city administration were very surprised. But then we realized that this was not uncoordinated. It was a highly professional, high speed performance. That is when it dawned on us that here was the self-organizing plural sector in action. So we in the city administration decided to give The Train of Hope all the technical support it might need, including background support on call. We then invited The Train of Hope to join the city’s crisis management network, an offer that was accepted. I am delighted to report that this cooperation has continued to perform consistently well, with no end date yet clear.

This is a PPP of a different kind: a public-plural-partnership, agile and flexible—sharing the governing of a crisis. Why Not? Isn’t this smart government? Much has been written about the sharing economy. But this is not like sharing lodging, as in Airbnb. It is about sharing concern, and help, and hope.

I am passionate about my work for the city of Vienna, and I feel privileged to be part of these very special events. Thanks to The Train of Hope, and the contribution of plural sector as a whole, I am now even more positive and optimistic about our future. If you are near Vienna, just go and take a look.

HM: I went on to the conference the following two days. On Friday, Wolfgang sent me his email with the story. I read it late that evening. My alarm was to ring in time to get me to my plane the next morning, but I woke up earlier. What to do with the extra time? Of course: just go and take a look.

It was quiet in the station at 8 am. (Turns out that it is now cleared in the evenings so that every refugee has an overnight bed.) But I was able to walk through where several people were still there, some in family groups, many sleeping, while other young men were talking together, killing time. I asked one family if I could take a photo but a young man waved me off.

Outside, clothing and supplies were stacked up neatly in tents. I saw a rough sign that read “Refugees Welcome.”  Nearby was a plastic sheet meant to be a door. I went in: this turned out to be the volunteers’ area. A woman at a desk asked “Do you want to help?” “I’m sorry, I can’t”, I said, “I have a plane to catch.” But then I realized that I too had an answer to the Irene question: “We’re writing a blog about this.” About hope.

About the authors:

© Henry Mintzberg and Wolfgang Müller 2015. The opinions and views expressed in this article are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect those of the institutions to which they are affiliated.

In addition, such commoditized labour experiences a globalization of competition (unless it’s bound to a site like taxi driving). Crowdworkers (freelancers on platforms) will also not have a work contract, but sign standard terms of service instead. Pay is determined by auction, not by minimum wage and work may be allocated by an algorithm, i.e. the boss is a computer.

Hence we have work ‘above the algorithm’, creating the platforms, and work ‘below the algorithm’ receiving their tasks from platforms [2]. Work above the algorithm tends to program its ideology into the code. The ideology found in a number of on-demand platforms is wage dumping. In Turkers’ (casual for freelancers on Amazon Mechanical Turk) descriptive lingo: “Wage theft is a feature, not a bug“.

We have seen this before: As one era ends and another begins, change occurs at a pace and scale that disrupts all aspects of society. We are now leaving the industrial era and enter the network society. When, over centuries, ancient civilization morphed into the industrial era, traditional craftsmen were disrupted by early industrialists. Even government was disrupted: monarchies were replaced by republics and democracy. The early industrialists, the ‘Robber Barons’, could amass great wealth in that they owned machinery and factories, giving them the power to dictate work conditions and wages. Then unions formed and re-established balance.

Today, people, driven out of regular jobs or not making enough as freelancers compete for tasks that are paid a tiny fraction of any possible minimum wage – several hundred thousands of them on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform alone. Just like the last era change, but with one difference: the new ‘Digital Robber Barons’ own data and infrastructure as intermediaries, but not the physical assets needed to deliver the actual service sold. Uber as the largest taxi company in the world doesn’t own one taxi, Airbnb doesn’t own a single apartment and Facebook as the largest media concern doesn’t produce content. The physical assets required to do the job are paid for by the workers.

Business models and the way we work, even government, are ready for disruption again, and maybe this is a chance for millions of people to create work for themselves in a self-responsible manner. Following the thoughts of Angus Deaton this could even enable developing countries to better participate in growth. Mankind has come a long way negotiating and fighting for social standards evolving from the tribal and feudal system and early ‘Robber Barons’. As such, business models are up for disruption, but social achievements have to be safeguarded and even developed further to suit network society. In fact it’s less about humans against robots: the question is more about how humans treat humans.

It may not be too realistic to expect the economy to regulate itself in creating fair working conditions. There is no such evidence in history. Without some kind of unions and a suitable legal framework crowdworkers alone may not be able wrest sustainable conditions for themselves (no such earlier evidence either). The responsibility for a smooth transition of society, preventing upheaval and unrest due to poverty or mass unemployment lies with governments, along with setting the rules for a networked society – and co-creating a vision of how such a future should look like.

Governments could be disrupted by corporations that already operate like platforms and networks – later maybe starting to form corporate states similar to the seasteads (floating cities of likeminded people recognized as a sovereign state) as proposed by Peter Thiel of Paypal. Who knows? Government is under attack at its core: MIT’s John Clippinger is quoted saying “Who needs government?” Currently, governments are confronted with a very powerful private sector and face eroding trust by the population. How to regain this trust and re-enter the arena as a balancing factor vis-a-vis the private sector protecting citizens against eroding social standards? Short: How will government disrupt itself?

Across the historical divide the organisation charts of companies and governments of every era took the shape that society showed as a whole. Currently organisation charts are developing into a networked structure. Therefore, government, too, must interact with networks. This way contact with citizens can be re-established and mutual (!) trust may be regained. Change wouldn’t need to be imposed – it could be co-created. Such results may see better endorsement, too – something that current policies often lack.

Finally, when it comes to co-creating a vision and common understanding of how our future should look like, a book by Jonathan Lear comes to mind: In ‘Radical Hope’ [3] he tells the story of the Crow Indians who were confronted with the extinction of the buffalo – their almost sole source of work and food. They were faced with cultural devastation: The way they used to live for centuries would end. Realizing the desperation and depression of his people, Chief Plenty Coups realised that his nation had to develop a new vision of how they should live and eat in the future. He called this concept ‘Radical Hope’. The economist Lawrence Summers warned that the world currently lacked that kind of political leaders – similar to the ones who helped shape the public policy during the industrial era [4].

The Crow Nation survived. Today it is our generations’ common responsibility to build a future that is inspiring and worth while – not just for a few, but for society as a whole. A strong public sector needs to re-enter the playing field to help build shared prosperity in addition to shared economy.

About the author:

Isabella Mader is Director of the Excellence Institute and university lecturer in the fields of Knowledge Management, Information Science and IT Strategy. 2013 she was awarded “Top CIO of the Year”. Her current research focuses on Network Economy, Communities and the Sharing Economy.

[1] Pofelt, Elaine; Shocker: 40% of Workers Now Have ‘Contingent’ Jobs, Says U.S. Government. Forbes, 25 May 2015. [Online]: http://www.forbes.com/sites/elainepofeldt/2015/05/25/shocker-40-of-workers-now-have-contingent-jobs-says-u-s-government/

[2] Compare: Wing Kosner, Anthony: Google Cabs And Uber Bots Will Challenge Jobs ‘Below The API’. Forbes, 4 February 2015 [Online]: http://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2015/02/04/google-cabs-and-uber-bots-will-challenge-jobs-below-the-api/
[3] Lear, Jonathan; Radical Hope – Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation. Harvard University Press, 2008.
[4] Hill, Andrew; Divisions emerge over effect of digital disruption. Financial Times, 24 January 2014- [Online]: http://app.ft.com/cms/s/3a7190a2-84df-11e3-8968-00144feab7de.html

The preliminary events began with a CEO Roundtable on the afternoon of Wednesday November 6. The opening ‘provocation’ was supplied by Tom Davenport and Julia Kirby’s June 2015 Harvard Business Review article “Beyond Automation”. In it they address the threat that artificial intelligence in the form of smart machines is encroaching on knowledge work to such an extent that it will lead to widespread unemployment. In the past machines took over work that was dangerous, dirty and dull. Now they seem to be taking over decision-making roles. Does it mean automation and the replacement of humans or is there scope for augmentation of human cognitive powers by machines? Should we be worried? The Davenport/Kirby shorthand answer, “Yes-No-Yes”, captured the both uncertainty of our questions about the future and the equivocality of the ‘answers’.

In the two days that followed the executive roundtable speakers and participants alike struggled to understand these questions and to come to grips with Peter Drucker’s acute observation that the major questions regarding technology are a not technical but human. The result was an exhilarating roller-coaster ride with unsettling plunges and thrilling loops that deposited all the riders safely at the end, but with their brains lightly fried. What follows is some of the highlights from the conference.

Tensions and Dilemmas

Tensions and dilemmas were everywhere at the forum. Are we dealing with a technology issue or a mindset issue, technical or moral? Or both? Are there limits to the ability of machine to make decisions? Should there be? How about limits on humans? What if a smart machine had overruled Lufthansa’s suicidal pilot? What distinguishes the zealots from the Luddites; West Coast optimism from East Coast pessimism? Is it a generation gap? Who will be affected and in what way? In the short-term or the long run? How do we distinguish hype from reality? What should who do about what? What’s the game plan? How do you manage? How do you lead? What’s our theory of change?

The conference participants, like the speakers, were a mix of tech-friendlies and tech-skeptics, with a full spectrum between the extremes. A sharper division was that between the values and concerns of small entrepreneurial firms and those of large established organizations, both commercial and governmental. Most of the academics and consultants present seemed more attentive to the latter group, who are presumably their natural clients.

Above and Below the Algorithm

One of the more interesting comments on the role of digital technology came from transportation entrepreneur Robin Chase, who pointed out that major innovations like Airbnb and Uber are aimed at either slicing up or aggregating existing spare capacity in society’s physical assets. This is why they neither own nor produce anything. The assets (housing and automobiles, roads and infrastructure) exist already. They may be disrupting the hospitality and taxi businesses around the world, but at the society level, despite all the talk of a ‘sharing economy’, they are primarily efficiency innovations that will reduce more jobs than they create. This may explain the pervasive ambivalence toward such technologies that create short-term benefits for individuals (albeit through what some describe as insecure, contingent jobs) but may spawn longer run problems for communities. Those who work “above” the algorithm (a tiny minority) may be fine; those who work “below” it will struggle.

Would a Thinking Machine do the Haka?

What does it mean to be human? New Zealander Kevin Roberts, Executive Chairman of Saatchi & Saatchi, captured its essence in a video-laced presentation to illustrate the ‘unreasonable power of ideas’. Rational thinking leads to conclusions but it takes emotion to get action and to generate ‘loyalty beyond reason’. With the 2015 World Cup of Rugby still fresh in fans’ memories, his video of the ultimately victorious All Blacks using their Haka war cry to intimidate their opponents was a compelling example of how humans deal with challenges in a ‘Super-VUCA’ world that is vibrant, unreal, crazy and astounding. It was a very welcome break from the pervasive rationalism that dismisses such human phenomena as ‘biases’ to be countered and eliminated. Would a thinking machine do the Haka? Why?

A Second Silent Spring?

Sherry Turkle, Director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, addressed the growing movement among the digerati of people who would “rather text than talk”. She argued that communications technology makes us forget what we know about life. The result may be a second ‘silent spring’, an ‘assault on empathy’, that makes us less able to appreciate the situation of another person and to ‘give voice to the other’. John Hagel, Co-Chairman of Deloitte Consulting’s Center for the Edge, agreed, saying that technology brings out the worst in us and he stressed the power of narrative, the incomplete story that calls to its listeners to take action and see how it ends.

The Mindset Problem – It’s Bigger than Thinking

Peter Drucker once wrote that “The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said.” What wasn’t being discussed at the Drucker Forum was the either role of or limits to reason in management, organizations and work, both descriptively and normatively. Ever since the European Enlightenment there has been a struggle between Adam Smith’s “sociology of virtue” and the French “ideology of reason”. Smith contended that the essence of humanity was both a concern for justice driven by empathy and a preoccupation with self-interest enabled by reason. The French philosophes, however insisted on the primacy of reason. There is no doubt where Peter Drucker stood on this issue: he saw humans as living in a world of existential tensions, strung between their concern for others and their preoccupation with themselves. It is a world of “both…and”, not either/or, that offers continual opportunities for creativity and innovation. American management, on the other hand, theorists and practitioners alike, has tended to prefer the ideology of reason and the cult of efficiency that often accompanies it.

Several speakers at the Forum remarked that the CEOs of many large companies pursue efficiency to the exclusion of anything else. This approach places them firmly on the side of the machines and the use of digital technology to replace rather than to support people. Here is a symptom of the ‘mindset’ problem, but its root causes remain to be explored. One suspects that they lie much deeper than many imagine and that their exploration will have a huge impact on how we act and think. Fortunately this means that there is plenty material for future meetings that will do well to match the intensity and excitement of the 2015 Drucker Forum.

About the author:

David K. Hurst is a management author, educator, and consultant. His latest book is The New Ecology of Leadership: Business Mastery in a Chaotic World (Columbia University Press 2012).

…by which I mean they have self-belief, self-control, and self-actualisation.

But they’re not the solution to rising unemployment caused by the rise of machines. We heard a lot at the recent Drucker Forum about the rise of machines, and how natural monopolies are being eliminated as competitive advantages erode quicker. Stability is not normal any more.

So we can plan our societies for reducing levels of employment, and find things for people to fill their time with, together with a socially inclusive way of allowing them to fulfil their needs for food, shelter etc. and/or we can find ways of allowing them employment opportunities which are different from now. There is a rise in freelancing – in other words, small projects for disparate employers, and rising entrepreneurial activities now as big businesses benefits both in employment and market share eroded rapidly. We’ve argued before that small businesses will be taking over from big business and we’ve heard nothing to the contrary. Big business ways of working/models are in the main dead men walking. We want more personalisation and customisation and better experiences with the things that we buy, and big business has difficulty in providing this in a mass production and mass marketing environment.

My suggestion is that we have moved from a village economy pre-Industrial Revolution through mass production and standardisation during the industrial and technological revolutions of the last 200 – 300 years, and we are moving back now to a village economy, albeit a global village, where we can get exactly what we want made with direct input from ourselves to the maker.

How does this help what is becoming a rapidly disenfranchised workforce as jobs are lost through technological advances? A session at the Drucker Forum argued that entrepreneurs would provide much of the solution, but I don’t think this is the case. Entrepreneurs are self-centred. That’s a good thing if you’re an entrepreneur, as it helps you to grow businesses. But individuals cannot grow the many businesses needed to soak up the excess employment capacity that is going to be generated. And I don’t think they need to. Excluding those activities that will still work in big businesses which will maybe run utilities and transport and the like, I think there are now three classes of employment. There will still be the freelancers who work for individual projects for whoever will pay them. There will still be entrepreneurs who will employ a body of people for that activity. But I think the big rise will be in self-employment. And by self-employment I mean people who will work for themselves employing a few people in a localised manner with no real requirement to build the business into something which they will intend to sell, and then start again like an entrepreneur does.

As such I think that the word entrepreneur is being misused. Not all people want to be an entrepreneur, but most aspire to be able to control their own destiny, which self-employment (and freelancing) provides every bit as well as entrepreneurship. Most will actually be entrepreneurial in some aspect of their activities, without having to build a model which relies on rapid growth and sale, just to do that over again. That doesn’t fit with most people’s objectives and aspirations.

The technological revolution has allowed small businesses to compete on a global stage, as we’ve mentioned before, and also compete against any size business. The small business can be more flexible, more personal, and faster to respond to changes in markets. It’s also very quick easy and cheap to test markets in this digital era.

The challenge for government is to stop pouring resource into the 5% of high growth potential businesses which are going to succeed anyway, and start teaching and supporting self-employment in a way that encourages many small business owners to take on at least one extra person. Just by doing this, potential unemployment issues caused by replacement technology could be significantly mitigated.

To achieve this, education on self-employment needs a radical overhaul. Just as graduate business education needs significant changes to nurture softer skills rather than just analytical ones, so does education for the self-employment model need realignment. This is currently being taught as a series of disparate technical disciplines with no way of amalgamating disciplines to see how they interact and fit together. We are taught how to write a business plan, how to do our books, how to do social media marketing, but we are not taught how these pieces of the jigsaw fit into the picture. Essentially businesses get the jigsaw pieces but they never see the picture on the box. How then will they know where the pieces relate to one another and the overall picture, and how they can join those things together? That is the challenge for education and government.

We try in our own small way to coach our client base so they understand how things relate and how they can think better about it. By doing this we expect our clients’ businesses to be easier for them to manage, and to achieve the growth that they want. This is not necessarily the most growth achievable as it is their individual/personal objectives which are important. These may not be wholly money based and in fact they seldom are. As our values change to reflect the richness of our life, this balance of aspirations will become more important.

Entrepreneurs still have their place, as they will lead where markets will be in future. The self-employed can feed from the knowledge created by entrepreneurs of what is new, useful and interesting. But they don’t have to be as daring as the entrepreneurs to achieve their objectives. They can go near the leading edge, instead of what is often the bleeding edge with its higher risks. They may wish to balance their risk profile because of other personal factors, such as family, and community.

Government policy has to recognise this change. Most governments operate some decades behind the times in terms of how they think businesses are structured and work. They also impose and rigorously enforce rules which become increasingly nonsensical in the workplace. Apart from the changing education policy towards self-employment, there needs to be more awareness of how social change affects public policy, and an implicit assumption that policy and rules have to change a lot faster. As government’s main job is to be re-elected, they need to tune in to popular movements which involves doing two things differently. Firstly, they should listen considerably more than they talk, and secondly, they should not assume that they have all the solutions (and neither should the electorate). The American constitution starts with ‘We, the people’, not ‘We, the government’. We need looser public policy to accommodate rapid changes in demographics and work profiles, which needs a growing realisation that people, whether freelancers, self-employed, or entrepreneurs, insist on running their own lives in their own way to make it meaningful for each individual.

About the author:

Nick Hixson is a business adviser and accountant, helping small and medium size business in strategy, leadership, management and team engagement. He also moderates the Drucker blog series.

What then are the management practices of “the frictionless corporation” that enable “labor, information, and money move easily, cheaply, and almost instantly”?

Over the last year, a group of companies interested in finding out joined together to form a Learning Consortium for the Creative Economy, sponsored by Scrum Alliance, a membership association of more than 400,000 members with the mission of transforming the world of work.

Following nine site visits conducted during the summer and a retrospective review by the members, the group’s findings and recommendations are now available here and will be presented on November 6 at the Drucker Forum 2015. The session will be live-streamed (free registration here)

The most important finding of the Learning Consortium is that “changes in mindset are more important than changes in hardware or software.”

“Where the management practices and methodologies were implemented without the requisite mindset,” the Learning Consortium reports, “no benefits were observed.” When technology is deployed with traditional mindsets, the organization is not agile enough to exploit it. To succeed, management must draw on the full talents and capabilities of those doing the work.

The key message of the Learning Consortium, writes Andrew Hill of the Financial Times, is to “set staff free without plunging them into chaos.”

Enlightened managers, “in some traditional-looking companies are already shaking up their approach without drama… Basic changes include the switch from rigid five-year plans to adaptable rolling strategies; or the use of a military-style mission-command approach, where chiefs set a goal and allow frontline troops to work out how to reach it rather than dictating every step.”

The Learning Consortium, writes Hill, has “come up with several useful snapshots, after visiting each other’s operations to observe these new practices. They found, for instance, that self-managed teams were not just tiny curiosities. They could scale up to handle complex cross-border work. Ericsson — hardly a fresh-faced start-up at nearly 140 years old — has given autonomy to 2,300 engineers in 110 teams, co-ordinated from Athlone, Ireland, to produce enterprise software for huge telecoms operators.”

“Microsoft, latterly a byword for how bureaucracy can bury innovation, has made similar strides. At its development division in Seattle, 4,300 staff make applications for software developers, working in a way that would put Google to shame. Open workspaces are in and individual offices are out; so are top-down programmes that shackled everyone to a sluggish two-year release timetable.”

A detailed account of the Learning Consortium’s site visit to Microsoft is available in two articles here and here.

The site visits changed the members’ image of Microsoft, which was less like the giant battleship they had expected and more like “a flotilla of speedboats operating and maneuvering in an orchestrated fashion.”

“Although there were many variations observed during the site visits,” the report says, “the Learning Consortium observed a striking convergence towards a set of management goals, principles and values that are markedly different from the management practices of hierarchical bureaucracy that is still pervasive in large organizations today. Although there was no ‘one size fits all’, the site visits revealed a family resemblance among the goals, principles and values of the companies visited.”

The mindset includes:

• Goals, attitudes and values that focus on added value and innovation for customers and users, rather than a preoccupation with short-term profits.
• Managers seeing themselves, and acting, as enablers, rather than controllers, so as to draw on the full talents and capacities of knowledge workers.
• The use of autonomous teams and networks of teams, in some cases operating at large scale with complex and mission-critical tasks.
• The coordination of work through structured, iterative, customer-focused practices, rather than bureaucracy.
• Embodying on a daily basis the values of transparency and continuous improvement of products, services and work methods.
• Communications that are open and conversational, rather than top-down and hierarchical.

“Individually, none of the observed management practices are new,” the report says. “What is new is the way that the new management goals, practices and values constitute a coherent and integrated system, driven by and lubricated with a common leadership mindset.”

“The leadership principles that were observed in these site visits are not a random collection of fixes. They fit together as a mutually reinforcing set of management patterns. Once an organization or unit embraces the leadership mindset, and pursues it consistently over a period of time, it affects everything in the organization—the way it plans, the way it manages, the way people work. Everything is different. It changes the game fundamentally.”

“Another universal feature of the site visits to organizations where the goals, principles and values are being successfully pursued is strong leadership. This was not only true in organizations that were in transformation from an entrenched legacy culture of hierarchical bureaucracy, where courageous championing of the different goals, principles and values is a sine qua non of progress in overcoming an adherence to the status quo. It was also true in newer organizations that were founded from the outset with the goals, principles and values of the Creative Economy, where continuous championing and vigilance are seen as necessary to preserve the organizational culture, and to prevent reversion to hierarchical bureaucracy, especially as the organization grows.”

Members of the Learning Consortium will be on hand at the Drucker Forum session to share and discuss the Consortium’s findings including: Richard Sheridan, Chief Execuive Officer of Menlo Innovations, Ahmed Sidky: Director. Development Management at Riot Games, Paul Madden, Head of Product Development, in Ericsson Athlone, Ireland, Chad Lindblom, Chief Information Officer, CH Robinson International and Thomas Juli, Senior Manager HR Organizational Development of Magna International.

About the author:

Steve Denning’s latest book is The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management. He is also the author of The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling, The Secret Language of Leadership, and a regular blog on Forbes.com.

He’s not alone. Gallup tells us that 87% of global employees are disengaged, so it should be the top priority for every CEO. Since work is fundamental to the human experience, employee engagement is very relevant to topics being explored at this year’s Drucker Forum.

87%. How did this happen? Could it be that by creating efficient, repeatable, scalable business processes, we have engineered the meaning out of work?  We hire diverse people with different skill sets, and we ask them to do the same job, the same way as everyone else. We set up rules and metrics to reduce errors through conformity and drive productivity through incentives and punishments. We are hoping that being less bad will somehow make us good. We don’t dare to dream about being great. In fact, in these engineered workplaces, an employee would have to break the rules to do something remarkable.

It’s no wonder most employees are disengaged. We isolate people, and put them in standardized, uniform work settings that reinforce the idea that your unique wants and needs are not of importance to us. Regardless of what we might say in our speeches, the decisions and policies of facilities and HR deliver a clearer, stronger message to employees.

What if we’ve reached the end of the S-curve that attempts to compete, by engineering processes that even disengaged workers can do adequately? How terrifying would it be to face a new competitor who has 87% engaged workers, who know exactly when and how to break the rules? What if they discovered that connecting people leads to faster innovation than isolating them? What if they really leveraged the diversity in their workforce to solve the global/local paradox and other issues we all face?

Many CEOs are aware of the problem and are working to improve employee engagement, starting with new programs aimed at wellbeing or offering flexible work hours. But a new program may not be the answer. Tom Rath, author of “Fully Charged,” has a theory about happiness. He says that if you seek happiness, you won’t find it. However, if you seek meaning, you will find happiness. The same applies to engagement. If you seek engagement directly, you may not find it. If you lead people to find meaning, perhaps you will.

We believe there are three specific types of meaning to consider:

• Meaningful work: What is the impact my organization has on the lives of customers and society?  How am I uniquely contributing to that purpose?
• Meaningful connections: How do we make it easier for employees to connect with their colleagues around the world?  How do we deepen existing relationships to build a strong social fabric within the organization?
• Meaningful progress: How can we help people feel a sense of accomplishment and help people feel they are making an impact?

Satya Nadella, the CEO at Microsoft, once said in an interview, “One of the things that I’m fascinated about generally is the rise and fall of everything from civilizations to families to companies. There are very few examples of even 100-year old companies. For us to be a 100-year old company where people find deep meaning at work, that’s the quest.”

What do you think it will take for organizations to help people find that kind of meaning in their work – whether they are long established businesses, or new start up companies?  How do you think about the significance of your own work? Reflect on when you were most engaged and discovered a sense of meaning.

Abouth the author:

Jim Keane is President and CEO of Steelcase, the global leader in the office furniture industry, and a member of the boards of Rockwell Automation and IDEO.

An hour earlier, while on a panel, I had answered some audience members’ tweets—sparking a minor controversy. Did reading from that tablet on stage enhance or diminish my humanity? Did it make me more connected or disconnected? I was still mulling over it when a row of benches on a side street distracted me.

I turned down it, pulled by a feeling of déjà vu that I could not make sense of, until the street delivered me to the entrance of a conservatory’s student residence. Then all of a sudden a memory of another autumn evening on that same street emerged intact.

I had stood there almost twenty-five years before, while on a rite of passage for many European teenagers of my generation—interrailing. We used the brand name of the monthly open train ticket for under-26s as a verb, because Interrail was, like Google today, not something you used. It was something you did.

Those cheap train rides were a social technology. They took young people on a journey into adulthood as Europeans, a journey towards each other and away from provincial upbringings and old conflicts that still cast their shadow on the continent.

For many a middle-aged man and woman, like me, the European ideal, first born out of the trauma of war and the promise of peace and prosperity, became a European identity over long nights in packed second-class carriages rolling to Paris, Munich, Madrid, Stockholm, or Amsterdam.

Standing on that Viennese street a quarter century spent living and working across Europe later, it occurred to me that those trains were one of the most humanizing technologies I have experienced in my lifetime.

What made them such was not the efficiency of railways’ engineering or the success of one pricing strategy. It was the freedom and connections they afforded us. Interrailing expanded who you were and where you belonged. It turned people unlike you into people like you. Grasping those trains’ significance, in other words, requires looking at them through both instrumental and humanistic lenses—picturing their geographical and cultural destinations, contemplating what they did and what they meant to us.

Those two lenses are necessary to grasp the significance of any technology. These days, unfortunately, we privilege the instrumental one. Where will new technologies take us? What will they do to and for us? Less often do we consider who we are becoming as we use them.

Consider popular sentiments about the rise of information technology: a mixture of hope and anxiety. We once reserved such feelings for our more charismatic leaders, but technology and leadership are associated ever more closely. Think of electric cars, computing devices, online retailing, search engines, and social media platforms to name just a few hi-tech enterprises whose expansion, and iconic leaders, provoke as much enthusiasm as suspicion nowadays.

Hope and anxiety about leaders deploying the latest technologies are not new. The controversy on the treatment of users’ data by companies and governments, for example, is the 21^st century installment of a timeless concern—the risk posed by leaders equipped with more technology than humanity.

What is new is that the risk now concerns most of us, whether we are leading countries or our own lives.

And so we discuss how to ensure that we control our machines, rather than the other way around. Meanwhile, we acquiesce to an imbalance equally risky as that between people and machines. That is, the imbalance of humanism and instrumentality in designing and using technology. While concerns for freedom, connections, and culture populate our rhetoric, it is concern for impact, returns, and efficiency that usually motivate our choices.

A technology cannot be called revolutionary, however, simply because it gives leaders more impact and reach. There is nothing revolutionary about leaders using new tools to expand their power. Technology can only be called revolutionary if it changes the way power is experienced, understood and distributed. And even then, the question remains open as to who benefits from that redistribution and what they do next.

Similarly, a technology cannot be called humanizing simply because it lets people broadcast their stories. There is nothing humanizing about using new tools to protect and assert our stories. Technology can only be called humanizing if it frees us up to revisit and broaden those stories, and if it helps us to better understand others’.

While technology often augments leaders’ power, and occasionally gives new leaders power, in short, it is humanity that keeps power in check. This is why the most productive relationship between instrumentalism and humanism is a conflict of equals. Subordinating one to the other does us harm. We might control technology and still kill humanism, with the excuse that it is too costly, inefficient, or passè.

Consider a fabled corporate creation myth, that of one college dropout’s stint in a calligraphy class. That passage of Steve Jobs’ life is often re-told to suggest that a background in the humanities, a refined taste, a meandering intellect are valuable because they help build a great company. Not because they will make one a more interesting and decent person. The subtle, devastating message is that humanism is a strategy for, rather than the counterbalance of, instrumental aims.

It is this attitude that dehumanizes us, before it is inscribed into technology through the intent of designers and habits of users. How can we be expected to build and use technology to liberate and connect people, if such attitude binds and isolates us?

Before we point our fingers at smartphones yet again, then, we would do well to revisit a fierce debate that shaped one of the most widespread technologies of the last century—management. The most influential advocate for its instrumental function, Frederick Taylor, argued that the function of managers was to increase efficiency and maximize their enterprises’ returns. Peter Drucker soon challenged those theories. He presented a humanistic view of managers’ function in the enterprise that cast both as vehicles for people’s expression and growth.

Many of the advances business has brought about in the past century can be seen as a result of the tension between those two visions of how to organize labor, enhance productivity, and define success. That tension will stop producing much progress if all we are left with is Taylorism in Druckerian clothes. Once all we care about is efficiency, and humanism is reduced to a matter of style, the real threat comes from the smart machines that we have become, not from those we will build.

Much like those old trains, we might not control the speed of technological advance, but we can still make plenty of choices about where we’re going. There is no going back, which makes it all the more important to consider what it means to move forward, rather than simply applauding or lamenting how fast we go.

About the author:

Gianpiero Petriglieri (@gpetriglieri) is associate professor of organisational behaviour at INSEAD ,where he directs the Management Acceleration Programme, the school’s flagship executive programme, and the initiative for Learning Innovation and Teaching Excellence.