On December 1, 2023, at the close of the 15th Annual Global Drucker Forum 2023 in the Hofberg Palace in Vienna, Austria, the Founder and President of the Forum, Richard Straub, made an unusual announcement. Instead of the traditional Drucker Forum announcement of the following year’s topic, he announced what he called “The Next Management.” namely, “The set of practices needed to raise performance in a changed world.”
He said that, at this time of the 15th Forum, “it was natural to think about the 20th Forum, as the next celebration that we hope to have.” He said that “the Forum would continue to do what it had done, but also some new things that needed to be thought about.“
“So what is next?” he said. “Let me show you what we believe should come next.”
The Next Management
“We call it ‘The Next Management’” said Straub. “The Next Management is really building on the ideas we have, but in the knowledge that we cannot continue as we have been doing. We must change what Drucker calls the practice of management, and the discipline of management behind it. It continues to be about performance—not only business performance, but performance in society. It is performance in the environment of a changed and continuously changing world.”
The Next Management “expresses what Drucker also tried to express for society when he talked about “the next society,” Straub said.
The Five Main Dimensions Of The Next Management
The Next Management centers on a number of dimensions.
· Innovation more than efficiency
· Ecosystem beyond the enterprise
· Societal enhancement vs narrow gains
· Technology augmenting (not automating) human creativity.
· Re-balancing art and science
Straub explained:
· “Innovation is a skill. It doesn’t mean efficiency goes away. But innovation must have a much higher role.”
· “The enterprise as an entity doesn’t go away, and nor do other institutions go away. But they evolve together and influence each other. Ecosystems are decisive, and more and more we talk about institutional ecosystems.”
· “This is the concept of societal enhancement. It is no longer acceptable that the individual company has just its own narrow objectives. We need to elevate management again to its proper level. As Drucker repeatedly said, management is a fundamental role for, and in, society.”
· “Dealing with technology will be tough. Technology should be about augmenting the human being, not automating everything in sight. In the right areas, artificial intelligence (AI) can give perfect results—while in others it would be disastrous to rely on it. We are reminded that the human being is neither a machine nor a purely rational entity.”
· “And let’s think about Art. Art reflects the uniqueness of the human being—because what certainly doesn’t work anymore is the idea inherited from the industrial age that one size fits all. Art shows us how human beings are all different. And human society and human groups have their own dynamics. Don’t get me wrong: science will be massively important for the future. But we can learn a lot from things that are different from science. We need to keep a balance.”
Next Steps
“The Drucker Forum is a small entity,” Straub noted, “and it will try to make its contribution as such. Its first is to give the new initiative a name. You need a new language when you want to change something. So we start with this language element of The Next Management.’”
The Forum also has an important strength to bear in terms of convening people. Straub added: “Convening the best of the best in terms of practice, in terms of thinkers, and in terms of audience–we have always prided ourselves on having the best audience in the world. That’s how the Forum can catalyze ideas and help bring things together”.
Straub described how, when Peter Drucker first launched into management, he discovered that, while there were bits and pieces, there was no management book as such. So what he did was to bring the bits and pieces together to form a system and a discipline. While the Forum isn’t Peter Drucker, it is inspired by his ideas and with the help of others, it can contribute to bringing today’s “bits and pieces” in the same way.
It would work alongside, and in alignment with, the Vienna Medal for Management Innovation, already announced by the Forum last year, which will celebrate notable advances in management—another small but significant contribution.
The Leitmotif For The Drucker Forum Over The Next Five Years
“The Next Management would form the leitmotif for the Forum over the next five years,” Straub said. He envisaged it as a book to be ready by the 20th Drucker Forum, with each of the next five Forums constituting a chapter in the volume.
“This is the big vision behind the announcement that aims to inspire our teams and our community to re-frame management for the 21st century,” Straub said. “There are good things in management today, but there are others that no long work. This is about taking a new perspective and renewing it in this way.”
An Invitation To Kick Off The New Venture
Straub concluded with an invitation to the entire audience, both in person and online, to help kick off the new venture. The first step would be a virtual event planned for the first half of March, “where some input has been gathered and how we think it will play out.”
More information about the initiative is available here.
And read also:
Drucker Forum 2018: A Major Transformation Of Management Is Already Under Way
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