Management as a Liberal Art Research Institute

The 14th Global Drucker Forum 2022

Michael Cortrite Ed.D.

PUBLISHED:

January 9, 2023

The 14th Global Drucker Forum 2022, held at Hofburg Palace, Vienna, Austria

PERFORMANCE THAT MATTERS: Sparking the Entrepreneurial Spirit

November 17 and 18, 2022


Drucker Forum founder and president, Richard Straub, in his opening statement for the Forum said, “Management-as-usual is not going to cut it.” He then announced the opening in January 2023 of “a new force for change”, The Vienna Center for Management Innovation. The aim of this center is to help solve the world’s problems by taking management to a new and higher level. According to Straub, we need a step change in productivity and innovation; We must ask of ourselves, how can we advance the social technology of management—in practice as well as theory—to do more to solve the problems and overcome the challenges of our fast-changing world. The Center, under the umbrella of Global Drucker Forum, will serve as a meeting place, both physical and virtual, a form of think tank, and a center for dialogue and research.

 

The location of the Forum was the Hofburg Palace, which serves as the Austrian seat of government. It is an awe-inspiring complex in the center of Vienna. The meeting rooms were palatial and ornate. The forum consisted of six sessions attended by all forum participants and eight sessions where participants picked which session to attend. All sessions were moderated panel discussions with either three or four speakers and time at the end of each session for questions from the audience. I was impressed with how they used the breaks between sessions: Food was served at lunch and at every break. Participants were asked to get our coffee or food and gather at the numerous standing tables and have discussions with each other. Lunch breaks were 75 minutes and shorter breaks were sometimes 30 minutes. I found this strategy to be very effective. Some of the best learning happened at the breaks.

 

The official statistics on the Forum were that over 500 people from 50 countries attended in person, and thousands more attended virtually. Two memorable highlights of the Forum were a celebration of Harvard Business Review’s 100th birthday and a video presentation by author and social philosopher, Charles Handy.

 

The Executive Editor, Editor-in-chief, and six other executives from Harvard Business Review attended the Forum and participated in the informal discussions at the breaks. They also presented a panel discussion on the Review’s philosophy. They noted that Peter Drucker had over 30 articles published in the Review.

 

Charles Handy attended all previous Forums. Handy has been listed by Thinkers 50 as one of the top 50 management thinkers in the world. He is now 90 years old and lives in Ireland. He sent an inspiring video presentation to be viewed by Forum participants.

 

The Forum topics included performance, innovation, entrepreneurism, intrepreneurism, change, spirituality, purpose and passion, autonomy, resilience, risk-taking, sustainability, and humility.  Some of the notes I wrote down from the Forum included:


·     What is performance?

·     Have we gone too far towards performance?

·     Mixing preference with prediction.

·     Don’t confuse effort with results.

·     If a supervisor says “no” to an employee's suggestion, they must write a report. If they say “yes”, they don’t have to write a report. (Amazon)

·     The journey is important, not the destination.

·     The current trend towards people often changing jobs might be because people leave when they don’t feel cared for.

·     Culture eats strategy for breakfast (Drucker)

·     Some leaders think, “How can I change without really changing”?

·     The ONLY thing that wants change is a wet baby.

·     Human-centric organizations.

·     Purpose drives performance.

·     The meaning of life is to find your gift, the purpose is to give it away.

·     There are too many CEO narcissists. They stifle innovation.

·     Is the world a better place because your company is in it?

 

Some miscellaneous observations I made: I only heard the name, Drucker. a few times. Many of the presentations were on concepts that Drucker wrote about, but had few Drucker quotes. Drucker’s idea of management as a liberal art was not discussed or spoken. The words leadership and management seemed to be used interchangeably. About 70 percent of the speakers used the word leadership, instead of management.

A Tribute to Charles Handy (1932-2024)

By Karen Linkletter Ph.D. • January 6, 2025
On December 13, 2024, we lost a seminal management philosopher and theorist: Charles Handy. Like Peter Drucker, Handy was a social thinker and management theorist who emphasized the human side of work as more important than profits and valued individual growth and development in organizations. Handy was born in Ireland and studied at Oxford. In 1956, he went to work for Shell, working in Borneo, where he met his future wife, Elizabeth Hill. Disillusioned by corporate life, Handy left Shell in 1962 to study management at MIT in their executive program. Inspired by their humanistic approach, he returned to London in 1967 to start the London Business School. Handy knew Drucker and was a regular keynote speaker at the Global Drucker Forum in Vienna. The two men had much in common in terms of their approaches to management and social theory. Like Drucker, Handy became an author (although, unlike Drucker, Handy was a corporate executive before he turned to writing). Handy wrote not just on business but also society, serving as much as a social ecologist as Drucker was. In his pivotal book, The Age of Unreason (1989), Handy argued for the disruption of discontinuity – resulting in a new world of business, education, and work that was highly unpredictable. He rejected shareholder capitalism and saw the organization as a place for human purpose and fulfillment, based on trust. Like Drucker, Handy advocated federalism in organizations, disseminating authority and responsibility to the lowest possible levels. He also saw “the future that had already happened.” Handy coined the term “portfolio life,” where knowledge workers would increasingly work remotely and for multiple organizations. In the 1980s, he posited that society consisted of “shamrock organizations”: those that had three integrated leaves: full-time employees, outside contractors, and temporary workers. Handy thus foresaw the new “gig economy” and increasingly autonomy of knowledge work. Finally, like Drucker, Handy had a life partner who not only supported his career but was an independent woman with her own interests. Liz Handy, like Doris Drucker, was an entrepreneur who ran an interior design business, and later was a professional photographer and Charles’s business agent.  Minglo Shao, founder of CIAM, remembers Handy as a warm man who made several important contributions to what we see as the fundamentals of Management as a Liberal Art. We are thankful for Handy’s contributions to management theory and social thought, and for his legacy at the Global Drucker Forum in the form of the Charles and Elizabeth Handy Lecture Series.

Treasures from the Charles Handy Drucker Forum legacy

By Richard and Ilse Straub with the Drucker Forum Team • December 29, 2024
For 15 years, Charles Handy did us the enormous honor of choosing the Drucker Forum as a privileged platform for delivering his message to the world, and particularly to the younger generation in which he had such faith. Following up on our initial announcement of Charles’ passing Charles Handy (1932–2024) , we are honored to share a selection of his key contributions to the Forum with our wider community. Charles’ brilliant keynotes at the Drucker Forum have become legendary. Normally accessible only to members of the Drucker Society, from today they are available as recordings to the wider public for a period of 30 days. At the first centennial Forum in 2009, Charles talked about his debt to Peter Drucker while outlining his own fundamental management concepts that he had developed over the years. Two years later, he touched on the ideas of Adam Smith and demonstrated how much more to them there was than the celebrated “invisible hand” of self-interest. In his landmark closing address in 2017, pursuing a thread developed in his 2015 book The Second Curve, he called for a management reformation that would turn it into a tool for the common good – thus drawing the first contours of what we would announce six years later as the Next Management . We took to heart his exhortation not to wait for great leaders but “to start small fires in the darkness, until they spread and the whole world is alight with a better vision of what we could do with our businesses”. Management’s "second curve" will be the focus of the “Charles and Elizabeth Handy Lecture Series” in 2025. Following the loss of his beloved wife Elizabeth in 2018 and a severe stroke, Charles was much reduced in mobility in his last years – but not in his determination to continue spreading his message of hope to the world. He couldn’t participate in person in the Drucker Forum 2022, but he participated in a moving online interview with his son Scott, who directed young actors in a short performance of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot by Beckett to illustrate some points.  Charles also contributed valued digital articles for our blog and for Drucker Forum partners. Even during the most difficult period of his life he continued to write and develop his ideas in weekly columns for the Idler magazine. This entailed first memorizing the article, then dictating it and finally reviewing it by having someone it re-read to him – a remarkable feat of memory and determination. The article is a jewel and most appropriate for Christmas and the season of self-reflection. Have a wonderful Christmas, happy holidays and a healthy and prosperous New Year.

The Future of Knowledge Work: What Drucker can teach us

By Karen Linkletter Ph.D. • November 19, 2024
Interview with Karen Linkletter at the 16th Global Peter Drucker Forum 2024  Video Interview
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