People often lament the qualities and capability of their leaders, political, civil, religious or otherwise. Indeed, they are regularly viewed with what has become known as the three D’s of leadership—doubt, distrust and dissent. Yet, in times of uncertainty, turbulence and crises, we crave the control and order that come with formal leadership structures and willingly submit to their authority. How can we explain the sudden switch?

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This article is one in the “shape the debate” series relating to the fully digital 12th Global Peter Drucker Forum, under the theme “Leadership Everywhere” on October 28, 29 & 30, 2020.
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Wakeup call

A crisis is a wakeup call. Crisis situations are extreme because they threaten our very survival, creating an overwhelming urgency to resolve them. Even more so, when the crisis is both ubiquitous and constantly emerging as it unfolds and plays out at full speed in a social media infused world. The current pandemic has shaken many of the foundations and deeply held assumptions underpinning society, economy and government.

The unique power of a crisis is in making the familiar shatter almost instantaneously.  Ian Mitroff observes that beyond the immediate harm wreaked by a crisis, there is a more insidious impact with an existential component, where all the important assumptions, the notions of what might be safe and the deeply held models become invalid all at once.

Crisis impact

The impact of a crisis can be likened to a rogue wave striking a ship in deep seas; sudden, spontaneous and significant. When the going gets tough, we pray for a reliable captain and the safety of a well-sheltered harbour, but the pandemic has turned things around, shuffling up our traditional playbooks. The response to the crisis has witnessed a near continuous stream of urgent and unexpected mini-projects; characterised by immediate decisions, plans that must be enacted in a matter of hours – or minutes – and an immediate reversal of our conservative aversion to risk taking and abolition of an excessive reliance on speculative business cases.

Positives

The results have been nothing less than spectacular: In our haste to respond to the emergency, we uncovered new abilities to work together, to collaborate and to achieve the impossible. The radical shifts that normally define transformation appear to have been mastered by society: Hospitals built in ten days, new vaccines in circulation within a matter of weeks, education systems moving online at the switch of a button, and significant changes to all forms of human interaction, communication and collaboration. Rather than find our new leaders for times of crisis, we rediscovered a new society ready can band together.

Drucker famously observed that ‘the greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence, it is to act with yesterday’s logic’. Perhaps it is high time to rethink the logic of leading. Crises can uncover heroes, allowing new leaders to emerge; and the new heroes, it appears, are more people just like us. ‘Ordinary’ foot soldiers including nurses, doctors, orderlies, drivers, and other front-line employees bravely stepping forward to grab the helm, support, enable and maintain organisations, networks, supply chains, customers, employees, the most vulnerable, whole communities and society at large. Ultimately, John Parenti’s advice to ‘treat this crisis as practice for the next crisis’ may offer a pragmatic way of preparing for the next cadre of emergency leaders awaiting their turn. Leaders in times of crisis must henceforth be prepared to embrace the emerging logic of tomorrow, in order to avoid the empty promise of yesterday.

Darren Dalcher is Professor in Strategic Project Management at Lancaster University Management School, UK. His most recent book is Leading the Project Revolution: Reframing the Human Dynamics of Successful Projects (Routledge 2019).

This article is one in the “shape the debate” series relating to the fully digital 12th Global Peter Drucker Forum, under the theme “Leadership Everywhere” on October 28, 29 & 30, 2020.
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Moderator
Andrew Hill Management Editor, Financial Times

Speakers
Donna Flynn VP, Global Talent at Steelcase
Guy Ben-Ishai Head of Economic Policy Research, Google
Tammy Erickson Leadership Advisor; top ranked management thinker, T50
Ashok Krish TCS Global Head, Digital Workplace

—
Even when it seems that old ways of working are being upended, evolving businesses, as Drucker pointed out, are always a mix of continuity and change. How will remote and office work settle into a new balance and what does this mean for leadership?

On  average almost 200 participants

What we do not miss about our offices/workplaces

Andrew Hill: Introductory survey: What do you NOT miss about the office/workplace:

• I do not miss seeing my boss in person (43%)
• I do not miss the office at all (32%)
• I do not miss networking in person (18%)
• I do not miss seeing my colleagues in person (7%)

Is remote leadership an oxymoron?

Donna Flynn: Leading remotely is not a contradiction, but it is different and harder. You need three skills in order to lead successfully: Being intentional, being clear and being able to connect with your team.

Guy Ben-Ishai: By definition leadership is about being present. If you are not present you cannot lead. Distance makes leadership more difficult. On the other hand, leadership is about managing uncertainty and risk which in the current pandemic remoteness is more of a problem for leadership than remoteness. So today there is no contradiction – remote leadership has virtually become a reality.

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This article is one in the “shape the debate” series relating to the fully digital 12th Global Peter Drucker Forum, under the theme “Leadership Everywhere” on October 28, 29 & 30, 2020.
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Tammy Erickson: Leadership is expressed in the way you focus time and attention. The successful leader is good at picking out the activity that deserves that focus. In the old leadership world remote leadership could be seen as an oxymoron because you had to see or monitor people to manage efficiency and standardization. In the new leadership world leadership is about thinking and imagination. Creating the right environment for that does not require physical presence.

Ashok Krish: Many people enjoy working remotely, e.g. developers. Working remotely is not a challenge for senior leaders who have always worked away from their head offices. It is a challenge for mid- and junior management, because people need to learn new rituals for virtual work. Zoom fatigue and too many zoom meetings to be productive. Example of effective rituals for online meetings: Create templates for certain kinds of meetings, working out loud, virtual coffee breaks, one-to-one chats. Act human online, as you would in the real world: How are they, how are their families …

Flynn: Spend the first 10 minutes of a virtual meeting in informal talk. Share family pictures, stories, design a virtual listening tour …

What is the main task of remote leadership?

Erickson: We have a strong bias to efficiency and productivity as a legacy from the past. What we now need are four new leadership roles: Disrupt, intrigue, connect and engage people in order to create the right environments for human interactions. Remote leadership is not a question of age but of mindset.

Ben-Ishai: It is really difficult to unlearn things we are comfortable with: What will we do in a couple of months/years when half of us want to go back to the office and the other half want to stay at home?

Erickson: It is the wrong question. Companies should not worry where the work is done. Treat your employees as adults: Ask them to get their work done. If they want to do it in the office, fine; if they don’t want to come to the office, also fine. As with the question what time should you come into the office, does it matter? We are adults!

What is the future role of the office?

Krish: Why do we work the way we do? And why are the offices the way they are? This is not a natural given.

Flynn: The office will become even more important for building culture and a sense of identity. But it is no longer the only place. Create an ecosystem of workplaces and give employees control over choices: Then they will do their best work. Culture is about aligning on shared goals, values, purpose, behaviors. Space shapes behavior!

Erickson: Carry out informal network mapping and coach those who are isolated. Over time we will increasingly pay for outcome. How much work are you wanting to do? Emotional bonds with your organization will occur naturally even if you are an external contractor and not fully employed. We don’t have yet the social safety nets in place that support the future of work.

Ben Ishai: Smaller organizations can maintain a culture more easily than large ones. If you lose your culture you lose your identity.

Breakaway groups: Non-digital aspects in regard to remote leadership and work:

Flynn: Being transparent, but the leadership challenge is how and when? Stage room in front of the camera, is that authentic and real to others watching? When is the right time to be online, when offline? When and how do you make people come together? Three design elements for on-site workshops (twice a year): We need to build something together; we need to have a lot of social time; we need to learn something together.

Ben-Ishai: Googlers really like the office space they are working in. Recognize individual preferences. Danger of missing synergies and tacit knowledge resulting in miscoordination when people no longer meet in the office.

Erickson (responding to Ben-Ishai): Not the leader’s problem: You need to educate or get rid of them. Treat them as adults: “I don’t manage your time but the quality of the output”.

Krish: Not all work can be measured by outcomes. Slackness is not a problem of remote work – it is even easier to detect than in the real office. Not every culture is a good culture. Get rid of bad habits in remote work. In addition, offices reduce diversity, excluding many people, e.g. women having to care for small children, people living in remote locations … So culture can evolve faster (it is much harder to change culture in a physical than in a remote workplace).

Conclusion/takeaways

Very interactive and lively plenary. The topic moves us all. Remote leadership is only an oxymoron for those who are stuck in an outdated understanding of leadership of command and control. Making the “Future of Work” work is much more a cultural challenge of changing mindsets and leadership behavior than a technical one.

About the author:
Stefan Güldenberg is Vice President Practice of the European Academy of Management and President-elect of The New Club of Paris, a think tank and agenda developer for the knowledge economy.

This article is one in the “shape the debate” series relating to the fully digital 12th Global Peter Drucker Forum, under the theme “Leadership Everywhere” on October 28, 29 & 30, 2020.
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Moderator
Julia Kirby senior editor, Harvard University Press

Speaker
John Hagel consultant and author, Net Gain
—
The most effective leaders of the future will be those who have the most powerful and inspiring questions and who are willing to acknowledge they don’t have the answers, and that they need and want help in finding the answers. It’s in sharp contrast to the conventional view of leaders as the ones who have the answers to all the questions.

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This article is one in the “shape the debate” series relating to the fully digital 12th Global Peter Drucker Forum, under the theme “Leadership Everywhere” on October 28, 29 & 30, 2020.
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When do leaders ask questions?

In this excellent dialogue, John Hagel began by noting an interesting contrast between leaders in private and leaders in the public sphere. In the privacy of leadership meetings leaders ask questions all the time: How can we increase our productivity by 10 percent? or Are you sure you have done everything to get this done? The basic purpose is to challenge managers to control them, not out of curiosity because the leader wants to learn something new. Even more when leaders give public talks they rarely ask questions; they provide the answers, because that is what we often expect from them.

The great transformation: From scalable efficiency towards scalable learning?

For Hagel, we are in a big shift – a great transformation from old models centered around scalable efficiency towards new models of scalable learning. Scalable efficiency management concentrates on managing cost, becoming faster and more efficient. The paradox here is that scalable efficiency is becoming less and less sufficient, being more fragile and more vulnerable to disruption. On the other hand scalable learning, the new management model, is not just running through training programs or HR development but rather means generating new knowledge and learning through actions together with others. In a rapidly changing world the organizations that will succeed in this world are the ones that will be able to learn faster at scale than others.

What is a strong leader?

The mark of a strong leader in the old world of scalable efficiency is that they have an answer to every question. If they don’t have the answer, maybe it is time to get rid of them and appoint someone who does. In the scalable learning model the mark of a strong leader is the one who has the most powerful question and who freely acknowledges that they don’t have an answer and need help to find one. The question: Can you help? really draws out the inspiration to learn. It cultivates the motivation to learn.

The example of Domino’s Pizza

There are few good examples of scalable learning yet. An exception is Domino’s Pizza: If customers complained that they didn’t like its pizzas any more, in the old management world leaders would have hushed up the statement and punished those responsible for the recipes. Following the model of scalable learning Domino’s managers made it public by directing the question back to their customers: Please help us: How can we make better pizzas? It generated an avalanche of ideas and added customer trust.

Everyone has to become a knowledge worker

Is the new model of scalable learning only relevant for knowledge workers? Who is a knowledge worker? For Hagel, everyone has to become a knowledge worker, because the rest can and will be rendered redundant by technology. What are the unseen problems and opportunities that can create more value? It is only by asking the questions that you can see what is coming down the line. Learn by acting.

What makes a question powerful?

According to Kirby: When it is inspiring and engaging. According to Hagel: When it focuses on a really big opportunity that has not been seen before and can motivate people to take risks. One of the leadership challenges is to move people beyond fear and inspire them to take risks. Many leaders drive change with a “burning platform” message: If we don’t change we die. But that feeds fear. Instead ask inspiring questions – here is the big opportunity, isn’t this worth changing for? – that help people to move beyond fear.

How do we get better at asking powerful questions?

Cultivating curiosity; zoom out and zoom in. Zoom out: Look far ahead at a distance, say 10 or 20 years, and use that to frame some of the opportunities and understanding of exponential change. Zoom in: What can we do in the short term to increase impact, accelerate movement and learn in the process. Used together, these can help to frame powerful questions that motivate people to act. Hagel sees himself as a combination of researcher and consultant: Zooming out and in. It is important not to become too abstract but at the same time to avoid focusing too much on detail. Look for edges (geographic edges, like emerging economies, demographic edges, technology edges, …).

Some further key insights/takeaways into the future of work

• The key question is: What will the work be about? From routine work towards non-routine work, because routine and standardized work will be taken over by machines.
• Too many talk about reskilling. Instead we have to cultivate capabilities like curiosity and asking powerful questions which make reskilling more effective at addressing unseen problems and opportunities to create future value.
• Opportunity-based narratives: Narratives differ from stories in that they are open ended. Apple: Think different.
• Trust is eroding in all our institutions. Why? Because leaders pretend to have answers to all possible questions: Either they have no clue or they are lying. The result is diminishing trust. To express vulnerability: I don’t know creates trust.
• ●       Curiosity: Most of us just want to be told what to do. Curiosity is like a muscle you have to train. Children should be our role models. Show me one that doesn’t have creativity and curiosity.

About the author:
Stefan Güldenberg is Vice President Practice of the European Academy of Management and President-elect of The New Club of Paris, a think tank and agenda developer for the knowledge economy

This article is one in the “shape the debate” series relating to the fully digital 12th Global Peter Drucker Forum, under the theme “Leadership Everywhere” on October 28, 29 & 30, 2020.
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Moderator:
Eduardo P. Braun Conference chair

Speakers:
James Li Senior VP, Huawei
Alex Adamopoulos CEO Emergn
Sunil Prashara President Project Management Institute
Gemma D’Auria Global leader, McKinsey Leadership Practice
Eric Cornuel President, EFMD
Yannick Fierling CEO, Haier Europe

The year 2020 has put us through a lot, but in doing so created settings for effective leaders to have real impact. Who has stepped up to the challenge and who has stumbled: What broad lessons in leadership can we take away from this annus horribilus?

After Gary Hamel’s ‘Woodstock of management’ the day before and the rousing welcome address of Salzburg president Helga Rabl-Stadler, the Opening Salvos session uwas just that: a sighting round. The question in the session’s title – is leadership rising to the occasion – was not directly addressed, but the assumption was clearly that it wasn’t. The six contributions were all riffs on how it could and should be done better, the practitioners’ practical agenda fitting into the wider tours d’horizon of the academic and advisory presentations.

Thus, laying out the context, McKinsey’s Gemma D’Auria described the global challenge of leadership as reshaping organisations set up along the management lines of the first industrial revolution to address the very different issues and circumstances of the second, all speeded up by Covid.

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This article is one in the “shape the debate” series relating to the fully digital 12th Global Peter Drucker Forum, under the theme “Leadership Everywhere” on October 28, 29 & 30, 2020.
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Leadership’s collective midlife crisis

The result was ‘a collective midlife leadership crisis’ in which everything about the firm – purpose, organisation and distinctiveness – was up for grabs. For leaders, the challenge was moving from a reactive to a creative mindset – pursuing discovery over certainty, partnership over authority and playing to positive-sum rather than zero-sum rules. As important as cognitive and problem-solving skills in this shift were the scarcer emotional and social ones. ‘Leading with intent, which means having a north star for yourself as well as your people, leading with love, because you can’t collaborate in networks without that, leading with mastery and curiosity,’ summed up D’Auria, who suggested that the most important factor of all for corporate survival was not strength or even intelligence, but Darwinian adaptability.

Sunil Prashara of the Project Management Institute agreed that the era of covid had starkly revealed the limitations of planning for the future. Rather than trying to anticipate every change and shock, leaders should focus on building “gymnastic organisations” that were agile and adaptive without sacrificing precision and control. Gymnastic leaders focus on outcomes not process, enabling them to embrace new ways of working to solve urgent problems, like instant construction of Nightingale hospitals and breakneck development of covid vaccines, for example. Key roles for leadership were driving innovation, empowering people, taking a stand on major issues such as climate change and working holistically to solve them.

An era of constrained leadership?

Eric Cornuel at EFMD blamed some of the leadership shortfall on ideology: how could leaders apply their full talents when they were artificially constrained by a shareholder-value model that favoured short-term profits over sustainability and social impact – a short-termism echoed by the electoral cycle in politics? The pandemic had intensified a ‘deep crisis of elite legitimacy’ which in the absence of political and corporate will could end up in societal upheaval, he warned. In this intellectual vacuum, behaving as the traditional detached observer could leave academia looking increasingly irrelevent. ‘We should stop being mute,’ he argued. ‘We should be catalysts and whistleblowers, change agents helping to reconcile management, technological development and society, so that we can contribute to a new deal and a new social paradigm.. there is no better moment for us to stand up and be relevant than today.’

From the point of view of a practical consultancy, Emergn’s Alex Adamopoulos reminded the audience of a few roadblocks barring the way to leadership’s brave new world. Many of them are familiar – and it’s striking, as he says, how little they change. They are also basic, like the tendency still to think of leadership pertaining only to executive and senior management. Likewise employee disengagement, overoptimistic estimates of the speed of cultural change, and the remoteness of management from the front line – so that ‘even when we talk about customer-centric or people-centric, are we really considering the needs of clients, or emphasizing points that are important to us?’

To combat these tendencies, Adamopoulos urged leaders to free up their organisations by organising for value propositions and value streams rather than budgets and functions, and to adopt the discovery and experimentation mindset also picked up on by McKinsey’s D’Auria. Nothing could be done without cultivating a deep sense of empowerment, which he described having both the sympathy and the empathy to understand what that really entails for both teams and customers.

Wanted: innovation and collaboration

The other two practitioner voices came from senior leaders from Chinese heavyweight corporates Huawei and Haier, who each underlined the importance of leaders in driving much-needed innovation and collaboration. Innovation, pointed out Huawei’s James Li, was key not just during the emergency – for example setting up 5G networks for two field hospitals in Wuhan in two days – but also in recovery, where better and faster connectivity will enable transport networks and businesses to open up more quickly. It was guided by the core value of ‘going where customers need you most’ in tough times – ‘helping our customers work through crisis is simply part of the job’. Global cooperation, meanwhile, was a no brainer. ‘In times like this we need to stick together. We need to be more open, more inclusive, more united. We are stronger together, and the more difficult the challenge the more leaders need to work as one to solve this global crisis.’

As for Haier’s Yannick Fierling, he pointed to the resilience of the company’s radically decentralised structure in responding to the crisis. ‘You shouldn’t be thinking about Haier as a big gigantic company but rather a forest of micro-enterprises all turned towards the end consumer’, he said. Haier’s structure and business model aim to capitalise on the internet’s effect of abolishing distance to get ever closer to the market – hence its concept of ‘zero distance to the customer’. ‘Imagine the advantage’ – shared incidentally with Hamel and Zanini’s empowered and decentralised exemplars – ‘of people with the steering wheels in their hands, able to serve the end-consumer on a daily basis without control from headquarters.’ Proof of the pudding: extravagant growth rates among Haier’s international subsidiaries even in crisis, in some cases touching 50 per cent.

The key is human agency

Like the other speakers, Fierling singled human agency as the key building block on which everything else rests. ‘The business model is entrepreneurship,’ Fierling declared. ‘As Drucker said, every person in a company should become their own CEO – and that’s what we’re living in this company every day’.

At the end of the session, the audience was invited to vote on the most pressing challenge for leadership in rising to the occasion: accelerating innovation, building a strong human-centred culture, defining purpose, fostering international stakeholder collaboration or enhancing leadership training. It was perhaps cheering that 45 per cent of respondents chose the building of a culture based on human values – even if the session left little doubt about the magnitude and difficulty of the transformation involved in doing so.

About the Author:
Simon Caulkin is senior editor for the Drucker Forum.

This article is one in the “shape the debate” series relating to the fully digital 12th Global Peter Drucker Forum, under the theme “Leadership Everywhere” on October 28, 29 & 30, 2020.
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THINKERS CORNER #12
Moderator
Bettina Rollow Organisational developer, Executive coach

Speaker
Tim Brown Chair, IDEO

Two years ago I had the privilege of meeting Tim Brown in Vienna, the godfather of design thinking. At this year’s Global Drucker Forum this year we listened to his views on how creativity and design thinking can help us navigate the global crisis and find new paths to a brighter future.

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This article is one in the “shape the debate” series relating to the fully digital 12th Global Peter Drucker Forum, under the theme “Leadership Everywhere” on October 28, 29 & 30, 2020.
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Rapid change and its opportunities

The together-alone paradox is our new normal and is challenging all areas of our lives. We realized that conditions can change very quickly and it’s not just technology that moves very fast. Tim Brown pointed out that usually even the most dramatic disruptions take years to play out: “During the pandemic the context in which our systems are operating has changed dramatically quickly. This rapid change created incredible stress in our businesses and systems.” In the redefined world we learned our lesson: “We need ways of dealing with a rapid change, not just in the area of technology. We have to find ways of adapting more speedily than in the past.”

On the other hand, this situation has also created great opportunity: “Evolution is capable of speeding up when conditions and environment change quickly”. This is why we should see the crisis also as a chance for transformation. Not just for companies, but also for societal systems. This is where design thinking can help. Tim expects that we will come out of the crisis amazed by how much innovation has actually happened.

How to shape a better world?

He recalled a quote from Herbert Simon: “Whenever we shape the world to meet our needs, then we are designing.” The world changes either because of nature, accident or intention. The intentional change can be described as a design: “We are designing all the time and everywhere. It’s whenever we wish to shape the world to meet our needs.” Hedescribed design thinking as a “codification of the mindsets and methods that we use to do the shaping of the world.”

He then emphasized the human-centric character of design thinking. Only learning about humans’ needs first makes it possible to imagine solutions to those needs: “Design thinkers are able to imagine things that don’t exist. The more creative the people are, the more unusual the solutions are. It takes remarkable creativity to imagine something no one else ever imagined before.” The process continues with turning the ideas into tangible, valuable things, so that people can interact with it and share their feedback. Constant iterations are the key to success: “That process never stops. Designing keeps going on forever.”

Return on creative capacity

The crisis has redefined the environment around us and its rules. It is essential to overcome the fear and tunnel vision caused by the unexpected change and uncertainty. Fear makes us blind  to new opportunities. Tim emphasized the importance of having creative capacity within the organizations in order to tackle the unexpected challenges: “Those who already had significant creative capacity, were able to respond very quickly to the crisis and pivot activities to do new things.”They were able to define answers to the new problems  extremely fast. The question which leaders should ask themselves is: do we have enough creative capacity to react to unexpected situations? Creativity should not be exclusive. “Creativity is something we should be able to apply on regularly”, he said.

New opportunities for the new world

He also sees the crisis as an opportunity for redesigning many societal systems.

One of the positive outcomes is the way in which we are understanding the potential benefits of ideas like the circular economy: “Having big supply chains, stretched across the globe really causes a problem when we have a crisis. A better blend of local and global and more circular supply chains is going to help us with climate change, resource use and being more resilient in future.”

He further emphasized the urgency to build systems, which can help society cope with change and speed up the adaptation process, so that we leave no one behind. He also invited us to rethink the aspects of systems we are living in: “We need to do a much better job in balancing the needs of different species in the system. Part of that is getting away from the fixation on growth. We have to measure other kinds of activity in our economy. Every system has an ultimate limit to growth, and we are exceeding those limits. We as human beings will pay dearly for that at some point. We already are.”

Experiment, fail and learn

Again Tim offers us a lesson: he suggests applying creativity to think further into the future, to think about more dramatic options. We need to build the habit of imagining our futures, futures which could possibly make our world a better place. An appealing futuristic vision helps society to have more energy to make the vision a reality. It may not be those dramatic versions that get built first, but we can learn so much from that process: “You have to treat failures as learning.” The only true failure is doing nothing.

About the Author:
Rosanna Sibora is Head of IT Innovation at Universal Music.

This article is one in the “shape the debate” series relating to the fully digital 12th Global Peter Drucker Forum, under the theme “Leadership Everywhere” on October 28, 29 & 30, 2020.
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“Those who only gradually improve their performance in exponential times fall back exponentially.” Curt Carlson, former CEO Stanford Research Institute

Following the business news in the weeks after this year’s Drucker Forum, it became clear that management, as taught at business schools, is headed for irrelevance. Today it no longer solves problems. It creates them. So-called “best practices” of management have caused a multitude of problems that only became apparent after a delay of decades, but are now making themselves felt with force. Every newly graduated MBA contributed in good faith to the spread of these practices. Now that they are being applied in all companies worldwide, their limitations and weaknesses are becoming increasingly obvious.

They fall short in dynamic market environments. They stifle innovation with bureaucracy and rigid processes. They overextend the decision-making capabilities of companies in increasingly complex and uncertain environments. They are way too slow in learning from and adapting to new challenges. They pitch scarce and valuable human assets into senseless battles of domination. They frustrate workers, discourage entrepreneurial creativity and risk-taking, and impede cooperation across domains or companies.

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Relevance lost

In short, our “best practices” have lost much of their business value. But why? First, let’s take a look at why they worked so well for so long.

At the dawn of the 20th century F. W. Taylor established the discipline of scientific management. His approaches created immediate benefits for companies by increasing productivity and quality, and reducing personnel costs. It was, in fact, one of the basic innovations of the second industrial revolution. Business schools emerging at this time adopted Taylor’s theories, weaving them into the DNA of management education.

Strict functional separation of the organization, combined with central control, and a shift of knowledge from skilled workers to management, boosted industrial productivity. This was such an advance that specialization, planning and control came to be regarded as general principles for efficient organization of all kinds of work. Taylorian practices were extended to strategic planning, accounting, people management and product innovation. And it all worked quite well, at a time of predictable market growth, with sufficient unconquered space still available for competitors.

Enter globalization and the internet

Yet this situation would not last forever. Enter the disruptive forces of globalization and the internet. Globally distributed value chains and just-in-time delivery increased the complexity of product markets. The internet democratized communication and opened up markets on a global scale by lowering entry barriers to many industries. Competition became ever tougher. Competitors multiplied, as did customer choice, prices fell and margins disappeared in the blink of an eye. Flexibility, speed and adaptability suddenly were in high demand. “Best practices” aimed at achieving maximum efficiency largely lost their power and thus their usefulness. But they had become firmly embedded as the gold standard of corporate management in the mind of managers who cling on to what they once learned, despite the fact that it doesn’t work any more.

Peter Drucker once wrote that the greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence; it is to act with yesterday’s logic.

Today’s market environments are complex and hyper-dynamic. The conditions for success have changed fundamentally. The old “best practices” are no longer even good. Companies need to find better ones if they are to thrive.

New practices for new times

We can do this by overcoming the self-imposed limitations of current management. Why plan in fixed yearly periods, when customers easily turn away from your products at any time? Why wait for the next budget cycle before approving funds for a new market opportunity? Why report and control tasks and resources along predetermined hierarchies, when relevant business activities require fast ad-hoc communication and coordination across networks of knowledge workers?

Today’s market environments call for management practices that can cope with complexity and change, with increasing customization of products and digital processes. In short: With customer-directed innovation at speed. New management principles are emerging from innovative leaders such as Amazon, Haier, Handelsbanken, Nucor, and Morning Star, which have broken up silos and decision-making bottlenecks to focus on customer needs and establishing entrepreneurial skills and incentives throughout the organization. Haier, Handelsbanken and Nucor impressively showcased these new principles at the GPDF20. As these and many more companies around the world demonstrate, such practices are not a privilege of start-ups or digital disruptors. They successfully work for companies of all sizes and industries. But beware: this time it won’t be done with the application of a few new methods at the operational level. The change is more fundamental. It will affect all levels of management.

Frederick Taylor brought one of the biggest management innovations of all time. But his practices have now reached their limits of their usefulness. Today, we need something else. Something better. Something that helps navigating the uncertainties of the digital age. Something that gives purpose again to management.

Change is here. Time to adapt.

About the Authors:
Janka Krings-Klebe and Jörg Schreiner are founders and managing partners of co-shift GmbH, helping companies to transform into business ecosystems, and authors of “Future Legends – Business in Hyper-Dynamic Markets“ (Tredition 2017)

This article is one in the “shape the debate” series relating to the fully digital 12th Global Peter Drucker Forum, under the theme “Leadership Everywhere” on October 28, 29 & 30, 2020.
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Moderator:
Raymond Hofmann Management & Organisation Designer

Panellists:
Santiago Iniguez, President IE University
Julia Middleton, Founder & Innovation Officer, Common Purpose
Vikram Mansharamani, Lecturer, Harvard University
Maelle Gavet, Tech executive, Author
Claudia Crummenerl, Managing Director, Capgemini Invent

We are in a Paradigm shift: From a stereotyped Leadership designed by white men, to skillful Coaching of diverse high performing teams

The quality of leadership is important for a well-working society. Still, good leaders seem to be rare according to Raymond Hofmann. A poll of the participants seemed to bear out his assumption, as 93% voted that there is a leadership problem in the world.

Problems of leadership

This was underlined by both Julia Middleton and by Santiago Iniguez. The problems, according to Julia, is that leaders are not punished for lying so people learn to become like them, producing institutionalized bad leadership. Further, the language about leadership was written by men, and therefore many women either don’t think they are leaders, or it takes them a long time to try to adapt to this male form of leadership. This means inefficiency, or even waste in the society

Drucker Forum 2020

This article is one in the “shape the debate” series relating to the fully digital 12th Global Peter Drucker Forum, under the theme “Leadership Everywhere” on October 28, 29 & 30, 2020.
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For Santiago the problem is in the concept of leadership itself. Leadership has been attributed to characteristics such as aggressiveness, arrogance, and a lack of respect for common rules. To emphasize this, he referred to Greek philosophers and Fredrich Nietzsche and his concept of ‘uber mensch’, that is supreme achievement, being a goal that humanity should set for itself. Instead, the definition of leadership needs to be updated and include bolt ons such as, diversity.

Vikram Mansharamani agreed with this quite dark picture of the current definition of leadership, but also added that from his more systemic perspective, the problem was also that leaders are educated in silos and are also fostered to work in them. He illustrated this by describing a typical executive board, in which all highly competent leaders turn to the CIO when an issue of IT investments came up. Instead, leaders should be educated in integrative thinking when problem solving. The aim is to extract value from one another, without giving up autonomy. Reflecting back on my own research on innovative companies’ leadership, this executive integrative thinking makes sense and was applied in the different companies by focusing on the market and user’s needs, rather than focusing on internal matters.

More positive leadership shifts

Maelle Gavet didn’t agree with the negative picture of today’s leaders. According to her research, leaders are pushed towards, or even pushing the ideas of authentic leadership and open communication. A new poll among participants indicated that both parties were right.

Therefore, there might co-exist at least two different concepts of leadership, one where leaders should be aggressive and authoritarian, and one in which leaders are great coaches, authentic and transparent. Maelle suggested that it could be a generation or industry factor behind this conflict. My own research on Silicon Valley tech firms, as well as on Haier in China support Maelle’s findings, and this is why I believe that we need to accept the fact that there is a new leadership model that co-exists in parallel with the ‘old’ stereotyped leadership model, and that this new leadership model is currently disseminating fast around the world for the simple reason that our new reality requires a new leadership model, which unleash talents and entrepreneurship within organizations. With data indicating that less than 30% of employees are engaged at work and that job satisfaction is steadily declining, a ‘new’ leadership model might be of huge interest to many corporate leaders, as well as for policy makers. So, if we play with the thought that there is a ‘new’ leadership model in the world, how would this ‘new’, hopefully better leadership be characterized?

What are the characteristics of good leadership?

Jeffrey Pfeffer stated in 1977 that one of the problems with leadership is the ambiguity of its definition. With this in mind the panelists tried to answer this complex question.

Claudia Crummenerl suggested that good leaders connect the best people. This fits well with my own studies of Google, where leaders are evaluated on how well they find and connect great people and then on how well they coach this team to become  high performing. Further, in the case of Haier, everyone is viewed as a potential new leader, which is why they allow anyone with a good idea that has a minimum of three followers to start a micro enterprise to fulfil their vision.

Claudia also emphasized the importance of leaders being agile and adaptable. This again, was underlined by my studies of Silicon Valley companies and Haier where adaptability of not only leaders, but of the structure and even business model was viewed as key for survival in 21^st century.

Maelle agreed, but also emphasized the importance of empathy, something that she found in her own study. Santiago agreed, and thought that on way of showing care about others was through greater diversity among leaders. Another is to train leaders in empathy, which all panelists agreed was very hard. Maelle, however, thought that data supporting a correlation between empathic leadership and team performance, together with storytelling could affect the organization’s culture and thereby foster a new behavior among leaders. This is possible and one example is how Google decided to start an annual management award in order to make ‘management’ more interesting for experts (that didn’t want to become managers), and to create storytelling around successful leaders with certain key characteristics and in this way create a culture on how leadership at Google should be. To enable leaders to become specifically more empathic, Claudia had an interesting thought that, as technology will be able to handle more and more managerial tasks, this could free up managers’ time so they could spend more of their time on the ‘people dimension’ of their job.

To wrap up this discussion, the panelists thought that the concept of leadership needs to change and that this change of leadership has to start as early as in elementary school. Students that shout loudest should not be rewarded, and instead teachers should reward more up to date styles of leadership and engagement. Teachers should therefore be an interesting target group for education and training in this ‘new’ leadership.

Conclusions

There is a division in views in regard to a 21^st century leadership, which requires further research and focus on next year’s Drucker Global Forum. Leadership traits such as creator of high performing teams, adaptability, as well as a higher empathy seem to be needed in the future. This fits very well with my own research findings based on data from Silicon Valley tech companies as well as from Haier in China. Finally, if we want a change in leadership, it has to start by being part of our educational system.

About the Author:
Dr. Annika Steiber runs the Rendanheyi Silicon Valley Center at Menlo College, California

This article is one in the “shape the debate” series relating to the fully digital 12th Global Peter Drucker Forum, under the theme “Leadership Everywhere” on October 28, 29 & 30, 2020.
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Moderator     
Ania Wieckowski Executive editor, HBR

Speakers      
Julia Hobsbawm Visiting professor of workplace social health, The Business School, Chair, UK Workshift Commission

Vlatka Hlupic Professor of leadership and organisational transformation, Hult Ashridge Executive Education

Barbara Kellerman Lecturer in public leadership, Kennedy School, Harvard University

Ricardo Vargas Executive director, Brightline Initiative

The difference between leadership and management was a debate Drucker resisted being drawn into. For him, boosting the quality of management was the biggest factor in maintaining great institutions. Yet the Drucker Forum has made leadership its 2020 theme. As a factor in enterprise success, does it deserve its own category?
 

What is leadership, what are leaders for, and are leaders and managers really the same thing? This was the starting point of a lively discussion moderated by HBR’s Ania Wieckowski. She opened by noting that in any forum the debate around leadership vs management quickly becomes heated. These days, she said, leadership activities tend to be more highly regarded than management functions – perhaps because “having a vision” sounds more impressive than supervising.

Barbara Kellerman, the first speaker, was straight into the fray. “Leadership” is a relatively recent term compared to “management”, she pointed out, but there’s a lot of confusion about how they differ and they are sometimes used interchangeably. We could use some consistent definitions – something she explores in her book Professionalising Leadership. “The reason we’re having this conversation in 2020 is because there has been no agreement in the world of business on what the two words mean. How can we avoid having this conversation five years from now?”

Drucker Forum 2020

This article is one in the “shape the debate” series relating to the fully digital 12th Global Peter Drucker Forum, under the theme “Leadership Everywhere” on October 28, 29 & 30, 2020.
#DruckerForum

Stop talking, start doing

It quickly became apparent that finding a way to resolve “management vs leadership” is important beyond semantics: we need to stop talking and start doing. Today’s challenges call for action, not arguments.

Hobsbawn is obsessed with the idea of cutting through complexity in order to get things done. Her latest book The Simplicity Principle: Six steps towards clarity in a complex world offers a way forward. “It’s a hybrid world now,” she said. “The best leaders are the best managers and the best managers are the best collegiate players. Sometimes we stand back to hear what’s being said, sometimes we direct the traffic and the conversation.”

At this time when everything about work is changing, let’s overturn assumptions and ask ourselves hard questions, she challenged. Is your organisation socially healthy? Is there real trust, are your networks diverse and are we judging managers by their output? She advised: “Have sympathy for your colleagues, keep it real, get results and take an approach to leadership and management which is simple and sweet.”

We also need to address system failures that seem almost inevitable at scale. “We need to reform and restructure. A great metaphor now is the office space itself. Look at the radical reshaping of how and where and when we work. In the UK now, 30% of people are working from home, and we’ve seen the biggest drop since 1994 in property being leased in central London. There’s a quantum shift in expectation that we will be anything other than hybrid. But if the fundamental structure is still the quarterly report, boards under boards, it’s a recipe for disaster. We need to reset everything.”

Leadership in crisis

Vargas said: “We live in a major crisis of leadership today, surrounded by a big group of egocentric leaders who think they know everything, driving polarisation.” Great leaders are human and care about more than money, he said. They inspire others and infect them with joy for their work. “It’s not easy to teach,” he acknowledged. “It’s something you have to live.” Key to good leadership in his view was the ability to inspire trust and adapt. “We’re living in a world that’s changing dramatically,” he said. “You need to be in permanent mutation.”

Hlupic called for nothing less than a revolution. Even before the pandemic, she declared, many workplaces were toxic breeding grounds for low productivity, with cultures of fear. Now, “Humanity is writing the next chapter of its evolution right in front of our eyes! We need radical, humane leaders.” The way forward? Trust, transparency, meritocracy, purpose, compassion, freedom and having fun working. Because there is much at stake. “We need to work on something much bigger than ourselves – to step up as leaders, it is time to act now.”

But how? Hlupic stressed the need for psychological safety. In her book Humane Capital she explains the need to lead from the heart, not just the head. Give responsibilities instead of tasks, trust people to do their job well. Decentralise decision-making so it’s based on knowledge, not a person’s position in the hierarchy. Ask yourself if your organisation is characterised by purpose, experimentation, tolerating mistakes, networking and feedback. Work should feel like fun.

Do the right thing

Some companies won’t survive this upheaval, said Hobsbawn. “If you want to get the right decisions made and the right behaviours happening you might need to stop doing some stuff and change.” In the words of Peter Drucker, “If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old.” That’s a big challenge for most of us.

Wieckowski asked the panel to consider bad leadership. What do we do with a leader who is incredibly effective but whose purpose is at odds with what we consider to be good? Are they flawed? “There’s no such thing as a ‘bad’ leader without ‘bad’ followers,” said Kellerman. Trump was a major disrupter, but the Republican-controlled US Senate was complicit. Followers have more power than they appear to – so the onus is on everyone to work for a better future.

Vargas stressed the urgency: we shouldn’t sit around waiting for “leaders” to solve the world’s problems. He echoed the sentiment of Peter Drucker, who saw that effectiveness was more important than efficiency: “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.” In this rapidly changing world, the concept of “doing things right” is starting to sound rather quaint.

About the author:
Kathy Brewis is Senior Managing Editor at Think at London Business School

This article is one in the “shape the debate” series relating to the fully digital 12th Global Peter Drucker Forum, under the theme “Leadership Everywhere” on October 28, 29 & 30, 2020.
#DruckerForum