At this year’s 15th Global Peter Drucker Forum, the Huawei Masterclass had as its guiding principle the idea of enabling the growth and innovation of startups. In his opening remarks, Gavin Allen, editor-in-chief of Huawei, said that SMEs are the engine that keeps Europe’s economy running and new ideas coming to fruition. A prosperous economy in Europe depends on its millions of new businesses. 

According to studies, a significant portion of SMEs still lack essential components of their ICT infrastructure, putting them in a digitally immature state. Huawei pledged in 2022 to build a start-up ecosystem around the world. In only three years, they aimed to back 10,000 promising new businesses. Speaking at the event, Fen Zhuang—Director of Global Industry Development at Huawei Cloud Global Marketing and Sales Service—introduced the attendees to the Huawei Cloud Start-up Program. Zhuang spoke about how the start-up community at Huawei is leading in this age of disruption by sharing knowledge and adding to the international conversation around creative resilience. 

Michael Anthony of AI4Privacy, Juan Romero of PhotoILike, Thamio Singou of Lean-Link, and Charles Dickson of Wemeetz were the leaders of four start-ups that participated in the Huawei program. They shed light on topics like cloud solutions and entrepreneurial leadership. 

As the room seemed to agree that digital maturity was a key ingredient in becoming a unicorn, the tables were turned by Carla Arellano, Partner at Greyhound Capital, and Curt Carlson, Distinguished Executive in Residence at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

Exceptional leaders needed

Carla is an entrepreneur with a knack for solving problems and a history of building successful businesses. She is fascinated by the power of collaboration between individuals and organizations to bring about long-term growth and industry revolutions. She firmly believes that in this age of discontinuity, no amount of initial public offerings (IPOs) can guarantee a startup’s success; rather, only exceptional leaders can devise and implement daring plans by mastering the art of people and organization development. Startups that go on to become unicorns often have a trait in common: they are the ones that hire leaders early on and place a premium on making this process a profession. Spending time learning the ins and outs of the company’s structure, including who does what and how important people pursue certain goals, is crucial, according to her, an investment partner at a growth equity fund. Investors like us put money into specific individuals rather than businesses. The individuals you choose to work for you and the way you set up shop are the deciding factors. On the path to becoming a unicorn, how you approach different roles, who you hire for what, how you hire great people, and how you create this combination of many individuals — matters a lot. While Carla is correct in saying that there is no magic formula for success, her team’s analysis of 350 FinTech companies over the past 20 years reveals two major factors that contribute to a startup’s chances of success: an organizational superpower and CEOs who put an early emphasis on attracting leaders. Organizational superpowers are different from start-ups’ product or technological superpowers. That superpower can be used to create a flywheel. From the way they hire new employees to the way they introduce new products/services, every aspect of a start-up’s management philosophy is important. Get a head start on hiring leaders and do it professionally. Hiring and recruiting C-suite executives is essential for investors who wish to witness start-ups expand at an exponential rate. 

Internal and external customers

According to Curt’s formula, superpowers pay attention to both internal and external customers, and they also create value. His work with managers at both established companies and fledgling businesses led him to believe that a systematic approach to creating value is within reach. To build resilient companies, it is essential to have a clear understanding of each employee’s role and how they contribute. Creating value entails meeting a critical need for the end-user in a way that is superior to competing solutions while simultaneously satisfying the requirements of all parties involved. Value delivery is the only goal of a well-designed methodology that identifies and solves end-user needs while differentiating them from their problems. From this perspective, innovation is all about creating new value for society’s end-users while maintaining a sustainable business model. This means that the offering and underlying viability model must take a novel, persuasive, and defendable strategy to meet a significant unmet market and end-user needs while also outperforming the competition and all other options in terms of benefits and costs by a factor of two to ten. A start-up can go on the unicorn track faster with the help of the NABC Value Proposition methodology, which helps to methodically develop the criteria for hiring a brilliant CEO.

Peter Drucker once said that a company’s market success comes from its management thinking, and Wolfgang Lassl, an Executive Advisor to Peter Drucker Society, echoed this sentiment. Someone with the ability to anticipate the unexpected, who innovates now so they are prepared for the future, and who does it methodically is an entrepreneur. Only then can the founder of the startup understand the need to be emotionally distant from his creation and recognize the need to hire someone to cover a leadership gap. 

Given the present situation, we need to train leaders to be open to surprise and challenge, as well as able to develop new scripts. Leaders need the skills to successfully navigate the unknown as entrepreneurs, to maintain business continuity and refresh their business models.

About the author:

Sylwia Sysko-Romańczuk is professor of innovation and entrepreneurship at Warsaw University of Technology with research interests in value-driven growth in the digital and networked economy.

Starting a panel discussion at Global Peter Drucker Forum 2021, Helga Novotny elaborated on the vast horizon of challenges faced by the global science in the 21st century. The academic community has been observing a rise in complexity: from tech finance speeding the banking systems to the climate changes speeding the economic systems. Complex systems reveal three inherent properties:

1. Emerging interconnections of the networks in which unexpected can come up
2. Building feedback loops into interconnections with positive or negative reinforcement
3. Massive adoption of ICT solutions

These three tipping points are starting radical changes in the systems’ nature, showing that the transformational breakdown has just arrived. Complex systems are filled with wicked problems, social or cultural, difficult, or impossible to solve.  Their complex and interconnected nature, which makes it difficult to determine appropriate solutions.

Doxa, techne, episteme, and predictive algorithms

Some are convinced that building models are essential for making better decisions. The scientific method has been adulterated with doxa mixed with philosophical beliefs, populism and conspiracy theories for centuries. But the scientific method has turned out to be the only reliable way of understanding the world because it invites professionalism, transparency, accountability, and methodological rigor. Thanks to episteme, progress is observed. The scientific method has branched out to emerging new technologies that have been changing our lives. Quantum computing is also a promising techne driver. New technologies allow us to build models with „what-if” calculations that are so much better in prediction than the previous ones—science and technology, in a fantastic way, accelerate progress. But we need to ask “To make better decisions by what criteria? It is an open question which provokes new ones: Do we need wide ranging data driven methods as means to determine markets, given the need for personalization, or should we be thinking more on a village/community/individual level? Modeling partial predictive solutions builds our belief in “managing the present”, but do we know where we are going? Without an answer to this question, it is difficult to manage performance.

Solving wicked problems with technology and interdisciplinary cooperation

Some scientists say that excellent theory comes from engagement with the world problems, not gaps in the literature. But could we expect much more from science? As the world is filled with wicked problems, they can only be solved with interdisciplinary research. That is not the strongest point of universities. Rebuilding how research is funded, and collaboration, means that performance in science cannot be limited to scientific publications  The three together of teaching, researching, and commercializing will drive academia performance.

Co-creating collaboration between researchers, entrepreneurs, and investors

It is important that scientists should work with entrepreneurs to invest investors’ money efficiently. Investors expect scientists to understand the research gap and entrepreneurs to understand the creative business problem resulting from research. Scientific models take time to mature for commercialization. Entrepreneurs come to investors for funds with simpler models that could create immediate revenue for building ventures. However, should science performance depend on commercialization success (results) or rather on learnings achieved in that process?

Regaining the trust and support of society at large

Until recently, drugs needed decades from discovery to development.,. Today we see both happening at the same time. Research does not seem to be the limiting factor. We have been observing very intense multidisciplinary collaboration that has not happened before. There are two challenges: (1) to have more people appreciating and embracing the importance of that cooperation, and (2) allowing research to be detached from urgent citizens’ purposes. Science is moving at a breathtaking speed. It is therefore essential to act against scientific illiteracy and anti-scientific campaign by boosting ethical values with philosophical purposes.  Paradoxically, science helps us solve the wicked problems we face; at the same time, scientists are losing the support of society.

Transformational time for research that does not belong only to universities

Understanding research timeline as long-terms solution to wicked problems will result in breakthrough innovations in both science and society. Technology, knowledge, and research are developed not only in universities but also in companies The best AI-powered projects are now being done at Google and Microsoft, not universities. However, quantum research has moved from companies to universities.

Chester I. Barnard (1886-1961), one of the pioneers of management thinking,  wrote in  The Functions of the Executive (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1938), that businesses are complex systems of cooperation because of the people of which they are composed. He was probably the first authors to emphasize the role of leadership, although the centrality of his work was cooperation. He wrote: “Cooperation, not leadership, is the creative process; but –he added– leadership is the essential fulminator of its forces.”

 A cooperative endeavor between academia, business, and end users, seems to be a possible route to a quicker resolution to the wicked problems that bedevil the world.

About the Author:

Sylwia Sysko-Romańczuk is professor of innovation and entrepreneurship at Warsaw University of Technology with research interests in value-driven growth in the digital and networked economy.

Business ecosystems are a consequence of the creativity of human persons; it is the actions of people that create and brings systems into existence. While the human person is both the source and the summit of ecosystems, we often risk the system we have created turning on us rather than contributing to human fulfilment. While fundamental to 21st century business, ecosystems have the power to develop or diminish human beings, depending on whether we treat people as a means to an end, or see them as an end in themselves.

Tools have traditionally been in the service of people, whether a plough, a printing press or a telephone. These things improved efficiency, yet left no doubt about the distinction between machines and humans: some ‘thing’ worked for some ‘one’. However, with the advent of advanced technology — mobile phones, the internet, artificial intelligence — this relationship has been reversed. In a highly networked world the person has become a servant to the machine, and is now little more than a product or series of data points, rather than a person with a distinct inner life and the freedom to choose. The person experiences herself being ‘something’ rather than ‘someone’ in an internet of things. Since things are expendable in the quest for efficiency, so too persons can be discarded when they outlive their usefulness. The challenge is not to forego the ecosystem, but to protect persons in the system.

Drucker Forum 2019

This article is one in the “shape the debate” series relating to the 11th Global Peter Drucker Forum, under the theme “The Power of Ecosystems” taking place on November 21 & 22, 2019 in Vienna, Austria.
#GPDF19 #ecosystems

In perhaps a world first, a Polish court in 2019 recognised this reality, ruling in favour of employees against Amazon regarding the evaluation of work. In the justification, the court stated that Amazon distorted the employment relationship by arbitrarily granting itself the right to dismiss the least efficient employees on the grounds their results were worse than the other 90 per cent. Such a system must assume a group of employees will always be assessed negatively, regardless of performance. In the court’s opinion, this exemplified the treatment of employees as mere objects and confirmed the employer was focused only on profit.

The Amazon case sets an important precedent. It shows that individuals are not simply a means of economic production but a ‘someone’, a distinct form of being. The person is at its core the integration of two dynamic structures: efficacy, the ability to freely act; and subjectivity, the reality of being a self, not another, understood through experiencing oneself. Depriving business of the person means depriving it of imagination, ingenuity, initiative and the emotional capability to embrace and manage uncertainty in a networked world. While ecosystems are nothing new, their complexity and pervasiveness has accelerated exponentially; yet the human person who is impacted by those systems is increasingly marginalised, to the detriment of business and society. We argue, therefore, that the key to creating sustainable ecosystems is sustaining people, the source and summit of those systems.

About the Authors:

Anthony Howard is founder and CEO of The Socratic Leader Academy, an author, a leadership philosopher and mentor to distinguished leaders. Sylwia Sysko-Romańczuk is professor of innovation and entrepreneurship at Warsaw University of Technology with research interests in value-driven growth in the digital and networked economy

This article is one in the Drucker Forum “shape the debate” series relating to the 11th Global Peter Drucker Forum, under the theme “The Power of Ecosystems”, taking place on November 21-22, 2019 in Vienna, Austria #GPDF19 #ecosystems