What Peter Drucker Would Be Reading
Recent selections from around the web that, we think, would have caught Peter Drucker’s eye:
1. The Structural Revolution: Is our current recession a down cycle or a grand reset? David Brooks writes in the New York Times that many people on the left think what we’re going through is a deeper-than-normal cyclical downturn. But Brooks believes that’s missing the truth: “The recession grew out of and exposed long-term flaws in the economy. Fixing these structural problems should be the order of the day, not papering over them with more debt.”
2. Why a Little Pessimism is a Good Thing: Americans are optimists in general. And if they’re not, they get told they’d better be. But Leslie Brokaw makes a good case on the Improvisations blog at MIT Sloan Management Review that pessimism should get a little more respect as a tool in its own right: “For one thing, it’s a good defensive tactic.”
3. Why Innovation Dies: If you have a wonderful innovation to suggest and want to make sure it goes nowhere, put it into the hands of a committee. That is what entrepreneur Steve Blank writes on his site. Blank offers many reasons why committees are no good for making innovation happen. One of them: “New market problems call for visionary founders, not consensus committee members.”
4. The Dx Comment of the Week: In response to our question about what it means that, according to new research, the workplace tends to be dominated by a small band of superstars and a large mass of below-average workers—a Pareto curve rather than a bell curve of talent distribution—Scott Kuethen had this to say:
Maybe the true stars are high-performing individuals who are team players. Fewer of those types than the masses to be sure.
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1 Comment
George L. Williams
May 11, 2012In Peter’s Post Capitalist Society, he wrote that we entered a major transformation around 1960; one he thought would run its course around 2020. I think he was right on! Most current writers and thinkers ignore the foundation crack that occurred with the end of the more than 150-year long period of chattel slavery, followed by peonage up to 1940. The most severe damage was done on the white side of society, although the non-white side has to perpetually innovate ways to survive.
As we trend toward a majority non-white country, the white side seems to retreat more toward a position wherein those with the most money, or the control over the largest sums of money will weild the whip hand. These are not “flaws” that can be “fixed”.