There is a small industry of commentators who decode the Berkshire Hathaway (BHI) Annual Letter to Shareholders – which includes Bill Gates.  Their findings vary but the letter released this February was especially interesting (in Gates Notes – “the best ever”).  Most focused on BHI’s financials, only to be expected.  But the letter included wide-ranging remarks by the ‘Sage of Omaha’ on the economy, the history of US productivity, and today’s social inequality.  Few remarked his stating that an economy driven by rising productivity leads to job losses for people whose skills get outmoded or when production moves elsewhere.  Or that ‘safety nets’ are needed, fabricated in Congress’s ‘contentious clashes’.  His analysis was ultimately sunny […]

As the 2016 Drucker Forum Abstract notes: entrepreneurship is “an activity once regarded as peripheral, even suspect, but now ‘cool’ and celebrated by politicians”. Entrepreneur, a charming word borrowed from old French, came into economists’ discourse around the time Adam Smith was writing. It has a positive uplifting feel, entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship are ‘good’ – who is going to say we need less of them? But the term carries burdens that loom as our global socioeconomy changes. First, since the time of Cantillon (who used the term in its modern business-oriented sense in 1732) business has become vastly more important, pushing back against lineage, religion, and political maneuver as sources of social and economic power. […]

While Peter Drucker was not the earliest writer on management, he added significantly to post-WW2 understanding.  First, he argued it was vital to study business and the legal, social, and ethical consequences of its freedoms to choose its purposes and practices.  Second, endorsing America’s distinctive contribution to business thinking – prioritizing the customer – he anticipated our often-breathless talk of rapid market, social, and technology change, and of managing as a global rather than local practice.  Third, he pointed to change within organizations.  While managers had been managing work for centuries, organizational work was changing.  He coined the term ‘knowledge worker’ to capture the huge shift from tangible to intangible assets as the key drivers […]