Defining the new entrepreneurship: how it’s different from the current one

A gap between entrepreneurship and art has arisen over past industrial revolutions. New entrepreneurship aims to close the gap. It is imbued with entrepreneurialism, transplanting into the socio-economic sphere Brunelleschi’s Renaissance perspective in the art world.

Current entrepreneurship is in the STEM field, following the Fordist production environment, characterised by the bureaucracy of the 20th century. Know How To Do now has to be Knowing How To Think, Imagine and Understand. This requires familiarity with the Arts. STEM changes to STEAM. In the new entrepreneurship mode, innovationists take over from incrementalists.

Digitisation joins science and engineering with design and arts, enabling creativity in human-centred uses of technology. The arts are catalysts in converting technological knowledge into new processes, products, and services. Techno-humanist entrepreneurship means encouraging the generation of ideas and ones that feed start-ups generating new values –requiring continuous learning and willingness to explore the unknown.

…and why it’s necessary today

By combining the “4 Knowings”, new entrepreneurship provides opportunity to aspire to more enriching work. Students of today need to become multi-faceted hunters of ideas. A combination between varied stories, artistic creations, and constructions of things configures the path of work. This shows a different horizon from occupations that exhaust people.

Managers should take courage

New entrepreneurship brings turbulence to management because it shows many facets of work, as Peter Drucker (1909-2005) observed. No longer the operator following unambiguous messages. For current entrepreneurship, managers are increasingly expecting automation to be the key to success. As a result, tomorrow’s work would not differ from today. Whereas new entrepreneurship urges managers to take on the role of Renaissance man, appreciating experiences that move towards an unpredictable future.

Entrepreneurialism: a cultural movement

Exorcising unemployment has been a prime driver of economic success. However, transition to the knowledge-based society has brought creators who ignore that push but embrace the pull of Entrepreneurialism. That is what will describe progressing communities and those in retreat.

Research is exploration escaping the knowledge map of past discoveries. Entrepreneurialism is the territory, not the map, it is Innovation after Research. It is leadership; not management. Also Innovation is not confined by rationality.

Entrepreneurialism – the mind and creative faculty for entrepreneurial actions, and underlying Entrepreneurship, the process of designing and starting a business – has the purpose of changing resources to create new wealth. Entrepreneurialism is not synonymous with Business. Unlike Business, Entrepreneurialism is not just about material prosperity. Entrepreneurialism and Entrepreneurship are ways of perceiving the world that contribute to the broader design of society, feeding a social movement that challenges the model of Business that sees the creation of value for shareholders as a fixed point, around which the company revolves.

Entrepreneurialism is not built to defined standards. That is a managerial function. Instead, it is an art form that, opening doors to the future, imagines its transformation into an entity called ‘Company’. It flourishes when experimenters meet and interact in informal groups, amateurs and pragmatists, not just academics.

Historical parallels

There have always been social innovators, like the Lunar Society of Birmingham, who met between 1765 and 1813. Curious about the natural world, the Lunar men created many Innovation and Entrepreneurialism results, such as the discovery of oxygen (Joseph Priestley, 1733-1804), the steam engine (James Watt, 1736-1819) and the commercialization of pottery (Josiah Wedgwood, 1730-1795). Their achievements extended to fossil classification, telescope manufacture, and the creation of electricity. They lived art in its broadest meaning, encompassing the natural world. As Jenny Uglow (2002) brilliantly recounts, <<In the time of the Lunar Men science and art were not separated: you could be an inventor and designer, an experimenter and a poet, a dreamer and an entrepreneur all at once without anyone raising an eyebrow…….when people spoke of the ‘arts’, they did not mean only the fine arts but also the ‘mechanic arts’, the skills and techniques in agriculture, say, or printing>>.

The imagination of Entrepreneurialism is unlimited, while Business moves within the confines of known knowledge. Entrepreneurialism has an organic basis, which often is at odds with that of Business, predicated on efficiencies at scale.

Entrepreneurialism as social utility

Entrepreneurialism has principles that are both utilitarian and pleasurable – pursuing one’s dreams and developing one’s potential. It also embraces utilitarianism preached by British philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill (1806-1873). That is, the pursuit of personal happiness is not at the expense of social happiness. Entrepreneurialism is less individualistic than is commonly believed. Depending on its culture and the way in which social and economic life is conducted, a country, a region or a community can act as an entrepreneur. That is how Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950) expressed it.

Shareholder value and conflict with entrepreneurialism

As Lao Tzu (601 BC- 531 BC) might say, Entrepreneurialism is the clay that shapes the vase of Business, filled with the idol of profit, and tyrannous shareholders. Consequently, it is not Business performance that is the master; instead, accounting profits and the share price, both subject to manipulation, are, as Martin Wolf writes (2018). This is a second form of dissonance from any entrepreneurial ambition; firstly the move towards replicable systems, followed by subservience to shareholder value.

The entrepreneurial function is regenerated by always creating new combinations. This churn sets the pace for creation of entrepreneurial enterprises, generating sustainable productivity and wealth for the common good. When it takes over Entrepreneurialism, the managerial culture – as Peter Drucker regretted –makes it difficult for people to work.

When Business increases the concentration of power and wealth in the hands of top management it sets a moral compass, reproducing the Golden Age of capitalism – an era of major social problems, satirised by the American sociologist Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929) in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). This is self-destruction on a grand scale. Dinosaurs of business marching towards the abyss as business models and mores of acceptable behaviour change around them.

Should large enterprises think small?

Across the big business spectrum are exemplars like Paul Polman of Unilever, apparently as a paragon of purpose for the company and its employees. Yet, he defends the advertisement for Unilever’s skin lightening cream in India because if Unilever didn’t do it, somebody else would. Whatever his individual views, as the CEO of a global company, he is still bound by shareholder value. Is there is more honesty in the small business sector, and a more effective social conscience? Perhaps so, but they are populated by the same Homo Sapiens. We can all be grasping, self-centered and downright bad. But small business owners and team are more likely to be confronted by their customers and suppliers. There are fewer layers of management and making it difficult to separate self-interest from the implications on people you know. In this sense their entrepreneurial activities may have a more social impact on their environment.

Effective speaks to Agile

Effective entrepreneurial activity still exists in large corporations, though. The market capitalizations of Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple and Google are now over $2trillion. All have adopted a small business mindset, otherwise called Agile, described by Steve Denning (2018). Close to customer, no internal markets, fast to innovate – all entrepreneurial activities and all have, with exceptions, provided value to the world at scale, whilst generating exceptional shareholder returns.

Humanism begets opportunities

By placing the person at the centre and affirming their dignity and autonomy, Entrepreneurialism embodies a new Renaissance humanism. By investing primarily in the value of man’s creative autonomy, the entrepreneurial enterprise focuses on the dynamism of co-creators and entrepreneurs rather than on the static nature of jobs. Knowledge professionals abandon incremental innovations to explore uncertainties to discover non-consumption opportunities. Coexistence and cognitive conflicts between different talents make the enterprise a place where opposing opinions creates opportunities.

Independence leads to community

Freed from bureaucracy, Entrepreneurialism acquires the independence necessary for innovation, creating economic growth together with well-being. Hence, Entrepreneurialism is a cultural movement. It is the community that is entrepreneurial, and the goal of Entrepreneurialism is the fulfilment of community needs.

This article is inspired by the Manifesto “ECONAISSANCE:
Economic knowledge in progress (and looking ahead)”, now being drawn up by a group of scholars from different countries coedited by Piero Formica and Nick Hixson

About the authors:

Piero Formica is Professor, Senior Research Fellow, Innovation Value Institute, Maynooth University, Ireland and Winner of the Innovation Luminary Award 2017

Nick Hixson is an entrepreneur, business enabler based in the South of England, and Drucker Associate

READINGS

Denning, S. (2018), The Age of Agile: How Smart Companies Are Transforming the Way Work Gets Done, American Management Association

Drucker, P. F. (1993), Post-capitalist Society, Peter F. Drucker

Hurst, D. K. (2018) unpublished Thesis and (2014) The New Ecology Of Leadership, Columbia University Press

Skidelski, R. (1992), John Maynard Keynes, II: The Economist as Saviour, 1920-1937, Macmillan London

Uglow J (2002) The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World. Faber and Faber, London


Veblen, T. (1899), The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions, Macmillan, New York (1a ed. it.: La teoria della classe agiata: studio economico sulle istituzioni, Einaudi, Torino, 1943)

Wolf, M. (2018), “We must rethink the purpose of the corporation. The idea that businesses only pursue profits leads to dire outcomes”, Financial Times, December 11

One of the greatest statesmen of the 20th century was Sir Winston Churchill. As the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, he helped to lead the world to victory during the Second World War. Churchill’s career was instructive. When he turned 25, he was elected to parliament and began his career as a statesman in the House of Commons. Despite an aristocratic background, lacking a prestigious list of backers to vouch for his talent, Churchill had to earn public recognition. As a leader, he possessed the necessary capability to inspire and empower other people. Today, thumbing through the pages of his books, I try to glean insight from both his decision-making skills and leadership qualities.

Since Churchill, ideas about leadership have changed. Unlike in his day, social media plays a vital role in “proving” leadership qualities. Today a person is judged on leadership skills based on the number of “followers” they have, regardless of how those followers are acquired. Peter Drucker’s definition of leadership is being literally applied: “The only definition of a leader is someone who has followers”, although perhaps not in the way he intended. Today, for a person to present him- or herself as a “future leader,” he or she needs to not only demonstrate purpose, the ability to empower, and a preference towards learning, but also well-known and reputable firms on their CV.

At the end of November, I was selected as a finalist for the “Drucker Challenge Essay Award 2018,” at the Global Peter Drucker Forum in Vienna. To learn and participate with guests who, like me, appreciate the contributions of Peter Drucker to management and leadership and consider his achievements of the first order.

The Forum pointed out that the most important qualifications of leaders and managers are their character and integrity – a human element. The decay in social and moral responsibility, which we are sadly witnessing currently, requires the right leadership and management skills and the right priorities to restore it. The Drucker Forum made it clear: more effective leadership and management techniques as well as more morally-driven narratives will be needed in the future.

However, where and how do we develop and identify these right leadership and management skills? In firms?

Emerging managers, current and former presidents, ministers, CEOs – you name it – all use social media and experience at elite business schools, consultancies and other blue-chip organisations to demonstrate their leadership credentials. In turn those organisations proudly point to their CEO alumni to prove the efficiency of their leadership production lines. Yet, many of today’s esteemed managerial class and leaders have been coming under increased media scrutiny for their apparent lack of essential leadership skills. Top management at Facebook, Uber and Theranos are three obvious examples.

This begs the question as to whether many of our world and corporate leaders are really destined for authentic leadership at all.

Most certainly, experience gained in A-list companies births both knowledge and skills to solve complex problems. Employees learn to develop higher levels of conceptual capacity and to deal with difficult long-term problems as they climb the organizational hierarchy. But can composing PowerPoint presentations and attending workshops really teach you the true leadership à la Churchill?

High-performance companies require constant availability that leave no time for the pursuit of personal hobbies, whether it be reading, painting or correspondence (as a winner of the Nobel Prize of Literature in 1953, Churchill appreciated the unity of poetry and art). A company culture of “up or out” does not encourage passion and loyalty. Having insufficient time for friends and loved ones does not enable a person to develop an outstanding personality; that same outstanding personality that ironically these companies require.

Back to Drucker. Management and leadership are embedded in culture, history and tradition, and because it deals with the fundamental disciplines of philosophy, expressed through knowledge, and wisdom, Drucker considered management an art; an art that required the ability of drawing together knowledge from the disciplines of psychology, philosophy, economics, and history.

Churchill is immortalized, not just for leading the Allies to victory in World War II, but for his character, foresight, passion, loyalty, personality, determination, and the optimism he was able to communicate. None of these traits can be learned behind an office desk. Future leaders need to redefine the meaning of leadership. Leadership is more than about working at high-ranking firms, holding titles, and having a social media following. As Churchill once said, “Kites rise highest against the wind – not with it”.

About the Author:

Sebastian Woller is a Management professional with experience in banking, consulting, the public sector and the automotive industry.

This article is one in a series related to the 10th Global Peter Drucker Forum, with the theme management. the human dimension, that took place on November 29 & 30, 2018 in Vienna, Austria #GPDF18

This article first appeared in Linkedin Pulse.

Based on the discussions at the recent Global Peter Drucker Forum, dubbed “the Davos of Management”, one can conclude that: It’s the dawn of a new leadership. A NewLeadership approach is required to transport organizations successfully into the intelligent age – or disappear as darkness disappears with the onset of light.

We conducted a three-year research for our book Radical Business Model Transformation and worked with hundreds of top leaders to distill both the mental model and next-practice capabilities of NewLeadership. We found that top leaders underestimate the gap between the actual and target leadership approach in their organization. Closing this gap will have a double leverage effect.

So, what distinguishes the winners in the intelligent age in terms of (a) the leadership mental model and (b) the leadership next-practices? And how can we close the gap in our organization?

NewLeadership Mental Model:
Integrating Human, Physical, Digital Machine World

Today’s leaders must appropriately balance and integrate three dimensions – the human, the physical and the digital machine world. In this still uncharted terrain for most leaders today, let us do the test and check if our leadership mental model is ready for the new intelligent age.

Automation Age – Integrating Human Labor and Physical Automation

In the industrial automation age, leaders needed to find the right combination between us human beings and the once new physical machines. Historically, wind, water and steam power mechanized production, later electric power enabled mass production, then information technology automated processes. With the establishment of Ford’s “automation department” in 1947, the term and concept became widely used. Automation partly replaced former human work, transformed existing job profiles and created demanding new jobs for better skilled humans. Over many technology waves and standards, the combination of human work and machines led to a substantial increase in economic productivity.

Digital Age – Integrating Physical Assets and Digital Machine Assets

In the ongoing digital age, our task as leaders is to balance and seamlessly integrate the physical and the digital world, at the same time acknowledging that the underlying profit pool is shifting to the digital end of the spectrum. But not everything will be digital – even 3D printing turns digital into physical results. In the Washington Post and Whole Foods, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos acquired two “analogue” firms for a reason – namely to integrate them with his digital empire.

Same with the rising number of digital twins, in which a digital equivalent of a physical asset is built to achieve better management of its lifecycle. The MAPAL Group, a hidden champion in precision tool manufacturing for e.g. robots, has transformed themselves into a data content provider with the digital twin as the heart of its digital strategy. Based on operations data from its installed base worldwide, it can distill out the best-practice parameters for optimal tool usage, like ideal cutting speed, and offer them as digital value-added services on top of the hardware business. The digital winners have understood that today’s leadership playing field is characterized by vastly “phytigal” co-existence.

Intelligent Age – Combining Digital Machine Intelligence and Human Intelligence

The intelligent age – portrayed in “The Age of Intelligent Machines” by Ray Kurzweil way back in 1990 – has now begun to manifest itself in earnest, and digital machines are becoming ever more performant. The greater variety of data sources and exponentially higher levels of computing power, allows for novel use cases at entirely different levels of cost-benefit ratios. At the same time, and there was wide agreement on this at the forum, the human dimension is often undervalued and underused. As leaders, how can we make sure that new technologies – such as AI and blockchain – take over the heavy lifting of boring, routine activities while humans stay in control by using technologies as enabler to focus on higher-value tasks, then leveraging originally human competencies? These include empathy and emotional intelligence, real creativity and effective networking, finally coaching and leadership.

To become great leaders, we must first be able to lead ourselves. This is another, neglected, aspect of management’s human dimension. If leaders can’t change, the organization can’t either. It starts with us. The new wave of growth of our economy and society will be at the intersection of “thinghood” (Heidegger) of physical assets, speed of the digital machine, and emotions and judgement of humans. This leadership triad, which starts and ends with the human, can either drive a virtuous circle of integrated economic as well social value creation or adverse consequences. It is the most critical leadership challenge of our times.

NewLeadership Next-Practice Capabilities:
Entrepreneurial, Digitally-Versed, Transformational and Grounded in Moral Integrity

We started by reflecting on our leadership mental model. Perspective is not about what you look at but about what you see. Remember that the sun never actually sets; it is our mental model that makes it appear to. In the next step, we focus on developing the next-practice capabilities from which NewLeadership draws its legitimacy.

NewLeadership is Entrepreneurial

“We are all born creative. Then why does criticizing, instead of creating, become the default practice in many organizations?” asked the MIT Sloan Management Review recently. Peter Drucker knew that innovation is the specific instrument of the entrepreneur. In this intelligent age, new technologies inherently enable new types of innovation and creativity in a domain, rather than simply enhancing traditional methods. Today, genius stems from a collection of many people with diverse experiences and perspectives, which we like to refer to as crowd and ecosystem and will be the theme of GPDF2019. Today, there is more power outside than inside the organization (In his GDPF post, Nicolas Collin calls this human “multitude”). Thus, NewLeadership is not about the leader, it is about the “ship” with its blurring borders between inside and outside. It is entrepreneurial in the sense that it shapes an organizational context for people co-creating the intelligent future.

NewLeadership is Digitally-Versed

From supporting more than 250 organizations in navigating their digital transformations, I learned one thing. Lack of imagination about digital-machine-enabled cases, such as the possibility to predict wildfires or landslides by training a neuronal network with satellite data, is still the key barrier to business and societal impact. While new “intelligent” examples combine exponential technologies and data sets in novel ways, leaders do not need to be digital natives or technology experts . They do not need an AI, blockchain or even digital strategy, which too often results in inside-out technology push programs. What leaders really need is a corporate or business mission, in which digital technologies have become an integral part of the organization’s value-creation system. If we understand both the horizontal winning patterns – like omnichannel experiences, platforms, ecosystems, digital forward integration (see also the WEF Digital Enterprise project report) – and the art of the possible in terms of intelligent applications, then we are truly equipped to shape the intelligent future.

NewLeadership is Transformational

The term “digitalization” is misleading. It is not an evolution that can be change-managed in a given trajectory. Nor does it happen automatically like the transition from caterpillar to butterfly. It requires active leadership to change gears to the next business and societal curve. A study from SAP’s Center for Digital Leadership of 280 transformation initiatives shows that most initiatives still focus on automation and efficiency gains. An increasing number can be classified as process reimagination. Only a minority of organizations transform the operating model or even drive business model transformation. The upside with such a strategic focus is that leaders can transform an organization holistically, with systematic delta-management and in a coherent way. Instead of transformations for the sake of transformation, every transformation needs to be innovation-led. Stop digitizing the past, innovate for the future!

NewLeadership is grounded in Moral and Ethical Integrity

In the light of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the New York Times ran a headline: “Don’t Fix Facebook. Replace It!”. We had the Lehman moment; now we have the Facebook moment. In the intelligent age, organizations will win in the long-term when their leadership is based on a moral and ethical foundation – again, something only humans can provide. This requires a realignment of incentives between the supervisory board, investors and the firm’s management and includes the conscious handling of moral dilemmas: Do we support the military use of AI? Should your driverless car value your life over a pedestrian’s? Should your Fitbit activity be used against you in a court case? Initiatives like the Future Life Institute’s Open Letter on the use of AI exemplify this. Dan’l Lewin, the director of the legendary Computer History Museum in Mountain View, describes the new challenge for Silicon Valley as understanding the social and political problems that their business models cause. Eventually, leadership needs to secure an organization’s moral license to operate.

The measure of a good leader is not how many followers you have but how many leaders you create. In this spirit, leadership development cannot be delegated to the HR department but is the essence of leadership. The #NewLeadership movement with its entrepreneurial, digital-machine-versed, transformational leadership, which is grounded in moral-ethical integrity and combines the best of the human, the physical and the machine world, is gaining momentum. Will you join?

About the Author:

Dr. Carsten Linz is leading organizations to transform for the intelligent age. He is Global Head of SAP’s Center for Digital Leadership, author of Radical Business Model Transformation, advisory member of the World Economic Forum’s ‘Digital Enterprise” and ‘Digital Platforms and Ecosystems’ projects and teaches in executive programs at Mannheim Business School, European School of Management & Technology Berlin, University of St. Gallen, and Stanford Graduate School.

This article is one in a series related to the 10th Global Peter Drucker Forum, with the theme management. the human dimension, that took place on November 29 & 30, 2018 in Vienna, Austria #GPDF18

This article first appeared in Linkedin Pulse.

One of my favorite presentations at this past November’s Global Peter Drucker Forum was from Marshall Goldsmith, a leadership coach and the author of, among other books, “What Got You Here Won’t Get You There.” As the title suggests, the qualities that make leaders successful as individuals can later become obstacles to their success as leaders.

Ascending to a leadership position requires prioritizing your individual success. Along your journey to a leadership role, you’ll likely face tests – both literal and figurative – that require you to prove how smart and capable you are as an individual. But great leaders need to work in the best interest of the people they manage, and not themselves.

Here are a few examples of the obstacles that stop leaders from being the best they can be.

Competitive instincts

Leaders are winners. In fact, they love winning – no matter the context, and, sometimes, to their own detriment.

Marshall provided a funny example that he shares with his own clients: imagine making dinner plans. You want to go to Restaurant X, but your partner likes Restaurant Y. You decide to go to their choice, and you hate it. The food is bad, the service is bad, it’s a major disappointment. How do you react?

You could say “I told you so.” Critique the meal, complain about the service, and insist that dinner would have been way better at Restaurant X.

Or, you could just keep quiet. Eat the food, try to enjoy it, and make the best out of the evening.

Which option do you think is better? And which do you think many people actually do? The obvious answer is to just keep quiet and try to have a good time, but leaders are competitive. Your instinct may be to prove that you’re right, but what would you even gain from having that argument? You’d end up with a bad night and a pretty annoyed partner.

Winners want to win at all costs, even if the “battle” is over something trivial. It’s an instinct that leaders should resist not just in their personal lives, but at work, too. If you’re in a position of authority, you don’t need to prove yourself. And in fact, if you keep trying to sound like the smartest person in the room, you’re more likely to alienate the people who depend on you, rather than provide any sort of valuable support.

The desire to add value

We all want to be seen as a valuable member of our teams. That instinct doesn’t really go away as a leader, but it can become more of a problem the higher you climb up the ladder, and that’s because of the influence your contributions can have on others around you.

Marshall provided another example: imagine a member of your team tells you their great idea. You like it, and you tell them so. But, you also throw in a suggestion. “Nice idea, but why don’t you add this, too.” There, you’ve added value. Job well done, right?

Not quite. Because, as Marshall explained, a suggestion from one’s boss is not merely a suggestion – it’s an order. Whether you intend to or not, the minute you make a suggestion to a member of your team, you’ve given them an order that they feel obligated to follow. So, when you decide to add on to their idea, you’ve actually made it your own. You may have added 5 percent of value to the idea, but you’ve removed 50 percent of their motivation to execute the idea, because it’s now something their boss has ordered them to do.

Instead of trying to add value, bless their idea as is, effectively taking yourself out of the way so they can get it done.

Telling, not asking

Quoting Peter Drucker, Marshall said that “The leader of the past knew how to tell, the leader of the future knows how to ask.”

The workforce of the future will be primarily knowledge workers. These people are the experts in their fields and will know more about what they’re doing than their leaders. But, leaders are traditionally taught to give orders – to tell their teams what to do and how to do it.

That simply won’t work in the era of the knowledge worker. How could you possibly dictate orders to someone who knows more about their own job than you do? It makes much more sense, Marshall said, for leaders to ask their teams how they think something should be done, and then empower the team to get it done themselves. Leaders need to ask, listen and learn.

Stop and breathe

This all sounds simple and intuitive, but it’s hard to do in practice. Marshall had a piece of advice: the next time you’re presented with a “test” of your leadership, just try to stop and breathe. Acknowledge any instincts to prove your smarts, add value, or give an order.

After that, I would suggest you think about what you could say or do that would actually help your team. In some cases, it might be to clear an obstacle for them, or to provide some resources that can help. Other times, it may be better to do nothing at all. If already you’ve done a good job hiring and empowering your team, then it could be best just to pass along some encouragement and let them get to work.

We see this type of thinking align well with the whole idea around servant leadership, a phrase that popped up in the last decade around the whole agile thing but something that has been out there for sometime as a mindset around being a better leader. We recently talked about The Servant Leader in our podcast series on The Emerging World of Work.

About the author:

Alex Adamopoulis is the Chief Executive Officer at Emergn Limited

This article is one in a series related to the 10th Global Peter Drucker Forum, with the theme management. the human dimension, that took place on November 29 & 30, 2018 in Vienna, Austria #GPDF18 – you can also check out my other articles related to the Forum; 5 Lessons the Managers of Tomorrow – and – The Power of Pull vs Push in Innovation

This article was first published on LinkedIn Pulse

How do thought leaders think about management, innovation, corporations, turbulent times, discontinuity, effective executives, and managing for the future? (Note: All these terms are from titles of Peter Drucker’s magnificent books). In this essay, italicized text indicates book titles or quotes from Peter Drucker.

I recently had the privilege of attending and participating in the 10th Annual Peter Drucker Forum. Conceived and delivered by Richard Straub (and his outstanding team), this remarkable event brought together sixty thought leaders in management from academia, industry, journalism, and consulting. Collectively, these leaders have published thousands of books about talent, organization, and leadership. In short eight- to twelve-minute bursts, they shared their insights on a how to reinvent, reimagine, and recreate the overall study of management that Peter Drucker founded.

Let me distill four insights from these thought leaders.

Change, in whatever form, is not new, but critical.

Whatever the latest incantation or term (agility, turbulence, reinvention, activism, transformation, learning, discovery, design thinking, disruption), recognizing and adapting to change creates success. Drucker (and others) talked about discontinuity (1969), turbulent times (1980), next economics (1981), a time of great change (1995), so change is not a new challenge. Even the term VUCA (1987) is not a new concept.

To respond to inevitable change, we need to look forward to opportunity more than lament the discomfort of the present; learn from both failure and success and see failure as an opportunity to learn; and recognize and let go of unconscious biases that hinder change. We now accept the fact that learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change. And the most pressing task is to teach people how to learn.

In today’s world, digital technology allows unheard of transparency, access, and sharing of information that drives change (15 to 20 percent of jobs will be done away with, and 65 percent of jobs will change with technology). This information ubiquity empowers (even requires) people to take accountability to be liberated in their own career, and it pivots organizational reinvention from hierarchies to platforms where everyone has access to information to make decisions.

Ideas matter.

In the sixty presentations (and hundreds of sidebar conversations), ideas matter. Each presenter brought unique insights and enormous passion for their ideas; some of the ideas were theoretical (role of business and government) and some pragmatic (experiences of leading CEOs); some research based (findings on innovation practices) and some conceptual (emerging organizational form); some narrower (ask good questions) and some broader (role of business in society); some skeptical (excesses of capitalism) and some optimistic (reinventing liberated organizations); and some looking back (lamenting hierarchy) and some looking forward (forthcoming digital transformations). Thought leaders are not short on thinking!

As I pondered this incredible smorgasbord of ideas, I was struck how leaders in all types of organizations and at all levels must learn to navigate the inevitable paradoxes of our times. Paradox in business means that there are fewer “from/to” work transitions and more “and/also” pivots. Some of the emerging leadership paradoxes of our day include:

• Working alone and working together. Deep personal expertise fosters innovation, and collaboration enables application. Leaders fight the war for talent, but they create victory through organizations.

• Creating purpose and making profit. People work (as if they are volunteers) for meaning and purpose, but without winning in the marketplace (making profit), there is no work. Leaders become both meaning makers and market creators. Businesses exist to produce results on the outside, in the market and in the economy.

• Managing hard data with analytics and soft data with stories. Decisions improve with analytics, but insights into the future often follow outlier stories. Leaders need to manage the head (analytics) and the heart (stories).

• Freedom through empowerment and accountability through the right culture. Leaders liberate their people to fulfill their potential, and they ensure accountability to customer value creation by having the right culture.

As leaders navigate between these (and other) paradox guardrails, they enable tension without contention, disagree without being disagreeable, and create a future without disrespecting the past. Leadership is defined by results not attributes.

IMPACT (in cap’s to highlight it) matters even more.

With innumerable ideas being shared, an inevitable challenge is to turn these ideas into IMPACT. The impact of these ideas may be on multiple stakeholders.

• An employee becomes an agent for himself or herself when he or she takes personal accountability for professional and personal choices.

• An individual leader better articulates purpose, empowers others, monitors time, and models values.

• An organization creates the right culture and installs the right governance mechanisms to inspire and connect employees, customers, and investors into a shared network or ecosystem.

• A government defines a political philosophy and generates regulatory statutes that move a country and citizenship forward.

• A movement redefines organizations as settings where people believe, become, and belong so that customers and investors win.

Creating this IMPACT comes from broad visions and simple actions. And, as noted in the Forum, progress is being made. Many of the leading organizations of our day (Alibaba, Amazon, Google, Haier, Huawei, Vinci, Unilever) are reinventing organizational principles that inspire people and create the right culture.

The future holds good news and warning signals.

Thought leaders frame ideas; diligent managers deliver results. Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.

From this conference, I am encouraged with the good news of fresh and insightful thinking that challenges orthodoxies, encourages innovation in organizational logic and individual agency, and creates a more boundary-less future.

Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes.

The only thing we know about the future is that it will be different.

At the same time, I am concerned about rhetoric not matching reality when thought leaders individually call for collaboration. In many ways, being a thought leader singing a solo is easier than a choir director bringing together many voices into one agenda. Thought leaders might better model thought leadership (plural, collaborative) by building on others’ ideas and working together through the difficult process of disagreements to find novel solutions.

In addition, I worry about an inside-out focus of many of the talks. Value is not defined by the giver or activity but the receiver or outcomes of the activity. The ultimate value of upgrading individual talent and establishing the right organization cultures comes from customers, investors, and communities. There was more attention given to what is done rather than the outcomes of what is done. There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create [and keep] a customer. The customer is a foundation of a business and keeps it in existence. The customer alone gives employment.

Even with these nagging caveats, now is a remarkable time for managerial and organizational innovation. As thought leaders transfer their thoughts into others’ actions, we enable individuals and organizations to fulfill their purpose and enrich the world we live in. I have great hope in this future. The best way to predict the future is to create it.

About the Author:

Ranked as the #1 management guru by Business Week, profiled by Fast Company as one of the world’s top 10 creative people in business, a top 5 coach in Forbes, and recognized on Thinkers50 as one of the world’s leading business thinkers, Dave Ulrich has a passion for ideas with impact. In his writing, teaching, and consulting, he continually seeks new ideas that tackle some of the world’s thorniest and longest standing challenges.

This article is one in a series related to the 10th Global Peter Drucker Forum, with the theme management. the human dimension, that has taken place on November 29 & 30, 2018 in Vienna, Austria #GPDF18

This article first appeared in Linkedin Pulse

This year’s Global Peter Drucker Forum in Vienna tackled the theme of the human dimension in management. In a rapidly changing world, where the business landscape is increasingly dominated by automation and AI, managers need to apply a human touch to the world of work more than ever. Particularly in regards to AI, business leaders are going to be playing an absolutely pivotal role in managing the impact artificial intelligence has on the workplace and the workforce.

I wanted to make the following points the central plank of my opening keynote at this year’s Drucker Forum because it’s crucial that the kinds of leaders that make the trip to Drucker are all on the same page about this. It really all boils down to this:

Leadership is about creating a vision.

Management is the harder part of putting it into practice.

This is also a core part of the work we do at Emergn and something I’ve touched on before in this Forbes article and our Emerging World of Work podcast.

As leaders, we have to chart a way forward on how AI and other technologies are going to shape what kinds of skills, tools and opportunities workers will be armed with, in order to keep absorbing new ideas and new ways of working, and stay ahead of the curve in their changing industries. And as managers, we have to be providing the day-to-day practical guidance that allows workers to keep doing just that.

There were a lot of outstanding and insightful sessions at this year’s Drucker Forum, exploring just what applying this human touch to management means – and also needs to mean going forward. Here are a few of my favorite takeaways from Drucker Forum 2018:

1. Driving innovation and inspiration requires trust.

Vineet Nayar, the CEO and Founder of Sampark Foundation, gave a really moving presentation about his and his wife’s work in helping to transform the quality of schools and public education for children in India. During that talk, he hit the nail on the head about what it takes to get the best out of people: inspiration. Workers want to be inspired to feel like they can take on seemingly impossible tasks and drive forward important missions. They don’t want to be seen as drones; or as Vineet put it, they want to be recognized as butterflies, not ants. Everyone is looking for inspiration, but inspiration starts from trust. Trust your employees and, in Vineet’s words, they will create magic.

2. Good management means celebrating empathy.

Jim Keane, CEO of Steelcase, opened his talk with an anecdote about his first job, as an elevator operator in the 70s. As Jim pointed out, while some like to romanticize the nostalgia of old-school elevator operators, the fact is it was backbreaking, tedious and dehumanizing work – stand there, crank the elevator up and down, don’t talk to the people riding with you. Technology like automation has done a great service in eliminating menial work like this, opening up opportunities for more engaging and innovative work for humans to do. That gets to the core point of Jim’s presentation: management has to celebrate empathy. As managers, we can’t forget to connect with workers on a human level in order to ensure we’re not throwing them into menial work. We need to be allowing humans to be humans, and do the kind of work only they can do. It’s not enough to just let technology do what technology is good at; we need to reinvest in people on a personal level, and make empathy a part of our work.

3. Skills are not the same as capabilities.

The difference between the two: skills are very context specific while capabilities are more fundamental and independent of context. Curiosity, creativity, imagination, emotional and social intelligence – these are all capabilities. As John Hagel, co-chairman at the Deloitte Center for the Edge, so precisely diagnosed, years of school have basically stamped out these capabilities in us and instead conditioned us to memorize and imitate whatever our teachers did, rather than think for ourselves. But capabilities are like muscles. They may be atrophied, but they’re also waiting to be exercised. As workers face a future where they shift from menial jobs eliminated by technology to the kinds of jobs that human beings really should be doing, it’s important we emphasize the importance of flexing these muscles and investing in human capabilities as instrumental to work.

4.  Innovation is a team effort, not the work of just one genius.

Harvard Business School professor Linda Hill gave one of my favorite talks of the event, and really drilled down into how leading innovation is not the same thing as leading change. Leading change means inspiring people to move in one direction, while leading innovation is about shaping context. That means getting leaders to foster environments that encourage a “collective genius” built from a diversity of views and experiences. Linda correctly points out that most innovations are not the result of just one genius having a lightbulb moment. Instead that genius more often than not comes out of a collection of people that span a diversity of perspectives and knowledge domains. Building that sense of community, with a shared purpose and a shared set of values but driven by all voices in the organization and not just the majority consensus, is what leads to true innovation.

5. Not pushing solutions allows better ideas to come forward.

One of the most compelling sessions of this year’s forum was a talk by Efosa Ojomo, who shared the story of the impact of instant noodles in Nigeria. Yes, you read that right. Efosa talked about how a Western bias for solutions aimed at improving life in Nigera typically focused on building schools, roads, hospitals, water-wells – all well-intentioned but ultimately dead-end projects. But what actually made a difference was an Indonesian company’s introduction of instant noodles, as a cheap, easy and nutritious meal that completely turned around the country and built a whole new economy around it: thousands of new jobs, millions of dollars in tax revenues and investments, new infrastructure like seaports, electricity, water treatment and agriculture. It’s an incredible story of not just how this company saw an opportunity to more easily feed people – and the ripple effects that came from that – but how abandoning old biases around solutions and focusing instead on simple needs in a new space can allow better ideas to come to the fore, creating new markets, new opportunities and new innovations.

I’m really just scratching the surface here; there is plenty more to share than just these five lessons, but I think these takeaways also represent a good cross-section of the kind of thinking and leadership that was on display at this year’s Drucker Forum.

It’s an exciting time to be a business leader. The world is changing at a rapid clip right before our eyes, and it’s in our power to ride the wave of these changes and leave behind a lasting impact for workers, their environments and the world around us – but only if we heed the importance of not just leading but also managing, and putting in the work on a ground-level, day-to-day basis to drive new ways of working and true innovation.

This article is one in a series related to the 10th Global Peter Drucker Forum, with the theme management. the human dimension, that has taken place on November 29 & 30, 2018 in Vienna, Austria #GPDF18

This article was first published on LinkedIn Pulse.

A few days ago, the first artwork made by an artificial intelligence (AI) program sold at Christie’s for €380,000. Judging from the auction price and media attention the blurry portrait of a man received, the first thought for many was that machines have mastered yet one more skill. Not only can they lift heavy loads, drill holes and beat humans at cerebral games like chess and Go – they have now made an incursion into the human realm of imagination and creation.

It is true that machines will take over ever more tasks currently performed by humans, and they will fundamentally influence the way we think, work, and live. At this point, it appears we are only one step away from Picasso or Einstein being rendered redundant, possibly replaced by Artificial Intelligence

But the truth is that even though machines can create, when they do, it is a pale imitation of human creativity. Let me explain.

The power of human imagination

No matter how fast and far technology advances, machines will always lack the imagination, creativity and judgement of humans. Human imagination produces images and ideas without any immediate input of the senses (or data). Human creativity uses complex cognitive processes yet to be fully understood (and thus hard to imitate). And human judgement is nuanced, not binary.

Humans have always sought answers to their questions solutions to their problems. Creation and innovation are the outcomes of this age-old process, in which humans have excelled. Innovation, which can be defined as a purpose-oriented creation, has played a key role in human evolution and our survival as a species. From flint arrowheads to sophisticated algorithms, our “problem-solving” ability has been used to the benefit of humanity. But because it is human, innovation is not a completely positive, error-free dynamic.

Many innovations in our history share a common duality: they represent enormous potential advancement on one hand, yet yet could just as easily destroy humanity on the other. Think of technologies based on fossil fuels or nuclear energy. That is why we need to apply another human innovation : ethics.

AI is the same – except that, for the first time, a technology seems to be encroaching on what was hitherto considered humanity’s exclusive domain of intellectual thinking and, ultimately, creation and innovation. For many, AI is thus a “Faustian bargain”, giving access to great power to something that puts the whole of humanity at risk. And yes, killer robots could engage targets with no human intervention. Yes, intelligent algorithms have the power to destroy many jobs. But this take on the technology fails to understand the complex and very ambivalent nature of innovation.

Personal AI – coming to your smartphone soon

I believe that AI will not only alter production processes and transform businesses models, but even more fundamentally, it will augment our daily lives. Ten years hence, it will be natural for us to carry our own portable AI. Embedded in a smartphone (or other hardware form), using a private cloud to integrate all relevant information, it will rapidly build a deep understanding of who we are, enabling it to provide us with tightly personalized services. Personal AI will simplify our lives in unimaginable ways, as electricity did in its day. It will be a trusted adviser and protector of our personal data. It will offer services that we really want and not the ones that advertising makes us want. And it will relieve us from many time-consuming tasks like searching, organizing and buying. By handling the “doing part”, portable AI will bequeath us time to spend on things we like, or tasks which require more human intelligence and concentration. Innovation, for instance.

The impact of AI on innovation will thus be twofold. As a powerful tool to analyze data, it will give a huge impetus to science and R&D. And as our personal portable companion, it will give us additional time – time to use our imagination, our creativity and our judgement. It is precisely these qualities of human intelligence that we need to apply today. To ensure AI enhances innovation in the best way possible, it is important to frame the innovation process itself. Our challenge is to find the right balance between tasks performed by machines and those performed by humans; to make clear what part humans stay out of and what part they stay involved in to ensure that they still hold the reins in future.

Five points to tame AI

To find this balance, we need to put five points on our AI agenda.

• First, promote its development. Like every successful technology, AI will thrive, mature and eventually become a commodity available to everyone. The faster this happens, the better.

• Second, regulate its development. We need to define powerful regulatory bodies to ensure AI develops to the benefit of humanity, not for a handful of companies.

• Third, accentuate the positive. The potential benefits of AI outweigh the risks by far, especially when we promote and regulate it well.

• Fourth, be innovative. There will be lots of new inventions to be made and implemented, particularly products and services linked to portable AI.

• And fifth, let’s call AI what it is supposed to be: human augmented intelligence. The term AI misleads by suggesting threatening scenarios of machine takeover and implying rivalry between artificial and human intelligence. On the contrary, the goal is that each should complement each other.

Innovation will always remain a human question. If we use our truly human skills and imagine, creatively design, judge, and implement the right environment, we can significantly alter the level of innovation. With the powerful help of machines, but as humans.

About the author:

Charles-Edouard Bouée, is CEO of Roland Berger, and author of Light Footprint Management: Leadership in Times of Change (Bloomsbury 2013) and Confucius et les Automates (Grasset, 2014)

This article is one in a series related to the 10th Global Peter Drucker Forum, with the theme management. the human dimension, taking place on November 29 & 30, 2018 in Vienna, Austria #GPDF18

This article first appeared in LinkedIn Pulse

Ten years of the Global Peter Drucker Forum: Richard Straub, founder and president, on visions for a better society – and a new paradigm for management

This November we are proud to celebrate the first decade of the Global Peter Drucker Forum. It all began in 2009 – the year that Peter Drucker would have turned 100. At that first congress, we had the special honor of welcoming Peter’s widow Doris to Vienna. We had the benefit of her wise advice until 2014, when she died at the age of 104. Her wish at the time has been has been both our legacy and our mission: “Do not make the Drucker Forum a Peter Drucker Museum,” she told us. “But stand on his shoulders and look to the future.”

Rediscovering our humanity

Standing on Drucker’s shoulders to look to the future: no small undertaking, but one we have done our best to fulfil over the last nine years as leading management thinkers and practitioners have used the Forum to debate Peter Drucker’s core ideas and values and how to apply them to our increasingly unpredictable world. It is fitting that in this anniversary year, as the Drucker Forum unfolds in the imposing surroundings of the Vienna Hofburg, we are breaking all records: not only in terms of attendance – we expect one thousand participants – but also in terms of events and networking opportunities for the young generation of managers now coming through.

Combating fear

The Forum’s central concerns have always been the social role of management and the foregrounding of humanity in the economy. Today, at a time when the latter is all too often marginalised by the pressure of economic constraints and the dynamics of the digital revolution, the prevailing feeling is fear. There is concern that even in most knowledge-based work we may be disposable, replaceable by “smart” technology. Is the logic of the technocrats and the algorithms really our destiny? To what extent can management play a role in humanising the future and reasserting the values of relationship, community, emotion and creativity? Not without reason, Peter Drucker described management as a liberal art – one of the humanities.

Note that we are not talking here about a touchy-feely “feel-good society”. We unambiguously need strong companies and institutions that do what they were created for – with and for people. Peter Drucker reminded us that free enterprise cannot be justified as good for business: “It can only be justified as good for society.” This means contributing to a functioning society though innovation and the creation of value. Their performance is put to the test by daily competition in the marketplace.

What kind of organizations and institutions do we need today and in the future, and what qualities will leaders need to guide them? How can the social technology of management develop a new synthesis between the quest for efficiency and the freeing up of human creativity?

The Drucker Forum: at the center of change

Of course, there are no patent remedies here either. Every organization has to chart its own way into the future. Yet breakthrough ideas and inspiration will be essential as we seek to initiate profound changes in management and leadership. We hope that the Drucker Forum will be a source of this inspiration. That will help to ensure the community that benefits from this platform for change will also grow and thrive. In today’s complex world, good intentions and engineered solutions are not enough to achieve sustainable transformation. Peter Drucker never wanted to know what managers thought of his lectures. He just asked, “Tell me what you’re going to do on Monday that’s different”

Change must come from a need: from the desire for vision, meaning and purpose. Our mission is to be at the center of these changes. Our deep aim is to attract an ever-growing group of dedicated thinkers and practitioners to join the common endeavor – the foundation for which has been laid by the first decade of the Drucker Forum.

Selected highlights from the Forum’s first 10 years

First Forum highlights (2009) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXHue14I3D4&feature=youtu.be

C.K. Prahalad opening keynote (2009) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F68w6sQ-kSU&feature=youtu.be

Clayton Christensen on data from hell (2016) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxecAi5-FBw&t=11m3s

Carlota Perez on the responsibility of the state (2017) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuVenQcdHX8&feature=youtu.be

Charles Handy final presentation (2017) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tg88zIgeE2o&feature=youtu.be

About the Author:

Richard Straub is the president of the Global Peter Drucker Forum

This article is one in a series related to the 10th Global Peter Drucker Forum, with the theme management. the human dimension, taking place on November 29 & 30, 2018 in Vienna, Austria #GPDF18

This article was first posted on LinkedIn Pulse