Global Peter Drucker Forum 2012 – Think Young Article by Alexander Brown

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Held in Vienna, Austria, between the 15th and 16th of November 2012, the Global Peter Drucker Forum explored in detail the system of capitalism. Moreover, the focal question was whether or not maximization of shareholder value should be the primary concern of a business. Two members of the ThinkYoung team attended the conference to offer a youthful insight to a setting one would assume to be habitually dominated by seasoned representatives of multinationals.   Richard Straub, President of the Peter Drucker Society Europe, referred to the participants of the conference as essential components in an engine of change, driving towards new and better horizons, both socially and economically. He later quoted Winston Churchill in his […]

The Case of Vestas Wind Systems and Peter Drucker’s five deadly sins of business by Jørn Bang Andersen

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Denmark’s Vestas Wind Systems is a world leader within the global wind turbine industry. But after 2008 Vestas has experienced a near death experience and is struggling for survival.  It is argued that had Vestas paid attention to what the management guru Peter Drucker labeled the five deadly business sins Vestas might have avoided getting into dire straits.   According to Drucker the five deadline business sins are applied to Vestas in this article and as follows.    1. The first and easily the most common sin is the worship of high profit margins and of “premium pricing. (Peter Drucker)   The financial targets for Vestas’No.1 in Modern Energy strategy were defined October 2009, as Triple […]

Democracy full circle: its invention may hold the key to its future
by Liviu Nedelescu

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Over two and a half millennia ago, Greek philosophers gave us the “dialectical” method of constructive argument. In the 21st century democracy is faced with significant challenges, and moving forward may require searching for solutions from the wisdom of democracy’s inventors.   The dialectic method is a form of reasoning based on dialogue of arguments and counter-arguments, advocating propositions (theses) and counter-propositions (anti-theses). The dialectical method of dialogue is unique and different from rhetoric and debate in that it aims to converge the opposite points of view and form a new and superior point of view from the synthesis of the initial arguments. This transcendence is possible by searching for commonalities between the two opposing points of view when considered […]

Bottom-up management and the reintegration of former child soldiers: a profile of the Grassroots Reconciliation Group
By Christopher Maclay

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I was first introduced to Peter Drucker – and to the broader management discipline in general – through my entry to the inaugural Drucker Challenge in 2010 and subsequent participation at the Drucker Forum in Vienna that year. At the time I had been working on a poverty reduction programme in Bangladesh, and since my work has taken me to a variety of international contexts to engage with a variety of complex social problems. Each problem needs a different solution, and each solution requires a different approach. However, one managerial principle lies at the centre of any effective initiative in this field: participation.   In The Practice of Management, Drucker explained that, ‘A decision should […]

The 2012 Drucker Forum – Never Stop Playing
David Hurst

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I returned over the weekend from the Drucker Forum in Vienna. It was a great conference! From my ecological perspective it was an “open patch”, a place in which people with many different backgrounds and perspectives can gather, have an open dialogue and exchange questions and answers. This is the “soil” in which new ideas of all kinds can grow without being crushed by giant orthodoxies.   On the first evening – a cocktail party for speakers and essay-winners – I introduced myself to a man standing alone. I noticed that he had a tiny gold medal pinned in his lapel. He was Dan Schechtman, winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, and a pioneer […]

Capitalism 2.0 Is Coming
by Marianne Abib-Pech

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Vienna November 2012, Palace Ferstel, in the grand settings of the Palace, memories of Menger, Hayek, Freud and Kohr laced with Elizabeth Of Austria presence are lingering. Mitteleuropa no more…or actually more than ever? This is the gala dinner of the 4th Peter Drucker Forum, the Austrian- born writer, teacher and consultant, who was once tagged as “the Man who invented management.” He liked to call himself a “social ecologist” – i.e. someone who deals with the man-made social environment in which we operate.   For two days last week, an eclectic mix of close to three hundred corporate executive, entrepreneurs and prominent members of Academia from all over the world gathered at the heart […]

Learning from the Forum
report by Drucker Challenge winner Yavnika Khanna, Capgemini

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For me, the greatest learning from Drucker’s ideas and the Forum is that it is not enough for managers and tomorrow’s leaders to recognize that the world around them in a constant state of chaos. Besides “business –as usual”, organizations today have an additional role to play in overcoming the cloud of distrust that has surrounded private sector as a response to the recent recessionary situations. In the words of Adrian Wooldridge, one of the keynote speakers at the Forum and columnist for The Economist, “we must pay heed to the warnings of the external environment”. Managers and organizations must shed managerial myopia, and as suggested by Rick Wartzman, a columnist for Forbes, resolve the […]

Peter Drucker Forum: Capitalism 2.0: new horizons for managers
by Vlatka Hlupic

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Last week I attended the Fourth Global Peter Drucker Forum, an international management conference dedicated to promote the legacy of Peter Drucker, a management professor, consultant and the world’s best known writer on management. The theme for this Forum was “Capitalism 2.0: new horizons for managers”. More than 300 participants from more than 30 countries around the world, led by some of the leading management thinkers such as Lynda Gratton, Roger Martin and Tammy Erickson, debated the future of management and capitalism. Overall consensus was that the future of re-invented management is here, the paradigm shift is unstoppable and management revolution is gradually gaining a momentum.   There is a hope that we can get out […]