Category: 10th Global Peter Drucker Forum

The Engineer and The Gardener: the Central Tension in 21st Century Management
by David Hurst

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“Warm hearts allied with cool heads seek a middle way between the extremes of abstract theory and personal impulse” Stephen Toulmin, Return to Reason In Masters of Management (2011) Adrian Wooldridge (Bagehot columnist for The Economist and frequent Drucker Forum participant) identified four defects in management theory: That it was constitutionally incapable of self-criticism Its terminology confuses rather than educates It rarely rises above common sense It is faddish and bedeviled by contradictions After declaring management theory “guilty” on all charges in various degrees, he identified the root problem as an “intellectual confusion at the heart of management theory; it has become… a battleground between two radically opposed philosophies. Management theorists usually belong to one […]

How a Gig Mindset Inside Organizations Will Shape Our Future
by Jane McConnell

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How does the gig mindset differ from a traditional approach to work? Is it just a question of nuance, of degree, or are there real, meaningful differences? What does it mean for people and their individual development? What impact does the gig mindset have on organizations? Does it build resilience, and trigger innovation? Does it create disorder and increase risk? The “gig mindset” research is based on eight behaviors (see figure below). The traditional mindset and the gig mindset are posed as opposites on the table, but in reality, people find themselves at different points along the spectrum, and individual people see themselves at multiple points on the spectrum depending on context and circumstances. The […]

Business Does Not Need the Humanities — But Humans Do
by Gianpiero Petriglieri

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Sometimes a simple story is all it takes to capture complex issues, or so it seems. Take this one. A few years ago, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg lost a game of Scrabble to a friend’s teenage daughter. “Before they played a second game, he wrote a simple computer program that would look up his letters in the dictionary so that he could choose from all possible words,” wrote New Yorker reporter Evan Osnos. As the girl told it to Osnos, “During the game in which I was playing the program, everyone around us was taking sides: Team Human and Team Machine.” The anecdote was too delicious to ignore, seeming to capture all we (think we) […]

Make Space for Humans
by Esther Clark

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As schools explore how to educate students and prepare them for a future that we can only imagine, organizations have similar questions. How do we create a product or service to address the needs of markets that don’t exist yet and how can we develop the skills required to do this? The focus of most organizations is on developing skills and know-how to address different scenarios. Rote memorization of facts or of the latest management theory is useless if it is not combined with the skills and empathy needed to adapt to new or uncertain circumstances. As humans, we need to think, discern, and curate rather than just memorize and consume. It’s what makes us […]

The Role of a Manager Has to Change in 5 Key Ways
by Joseph Pistrui & Dimo Dimov

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“First, let’s fire all the managers” said Gary Hamel almost seven years ago in Harvard Business Review. “Think of the countless hours that team leaders, department heads, and vice presidents devote to supervising the work of others.” Today, we believe that the problem in most organizations isn’t simply that management is inefficient, it’s that the role and purpose of a “manager” haven’t kept pace with what’s needed. For almost 100 years, management has been associated with the five basic functions outlined by management theorist Henri Fayol: planning, organizing, staffing, directing, and controlling. These have become the default dimensions of a manager. But they relate to pursuing a fixed target in a stable landscape. Take away […]

Beyond Budgeting at Equinor: how to become more adaptive and more human
by Bjarte Bogsnes

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Equinor (formerly Statoil) is Scandinavia’s largest company. We have always tried to be a values-based and human-centric organisation, ever since we hit the ground running in 1972 when oil and gas were discovered in Norway. During these great pioneer years, young people just in the door (including myself) were given huge responsibilities. Autonomy, empowerment, collaboration and trust were not necessarily conscious strategies. There was no choice if we wanted to catch up with the international giants that were already on the scene. During years of rapid growth, traditional management processes were also introduced. Brick by brick, this led to increased bureaucracy and rigidity. The gap widened between what we preached about values and leadership and what […]

Before we talk about the human dimension, we need to talk about management itself
by Raymond Hofmann

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In his introduction to the 10th Global Peter Drucker Forum, focussing on the human dimension of management, Richard Straub asks “What place do we give the human in organisations?” and, leaning on Aristotle’s phronesis, argues that “reasserting the human dimension means above all asking the why questions that enable us to ponder deeply who we are, what we do and where we should be going”. He concludes with a strong call to action: “Bearing direct responsibility for confronting these issues in the workplace, management can light the fire – and must do it now, before it is too late.” Worthwhile questions I have no doubt that the Forum, which again brings together the brightest minds […]

Delineating the Human Dimension at Work
by Renuka Abraham

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Management – The Human Dimension – a very valid topic of discussion in the face of businesses scrambling to automate, robotize, and optimize. Remember the days when the human dimension was the only dimension! How did we get to the point that we are debating about this? I asked a couple of colleagues what ‘the human dimension’ meant to them and I got surprisingly different interpretations and perspectives. Was this dispersed knowledge or the so-called Rashomon Effect? Either way, it was quite an eye-opener. Coffee Corner and Watercooler Moments ‘Empathy at the workplace’ was the most common (and obvious) interpretation of the human dimension in management. Often viewed as an antonym of professionalism, empathy has […]