Drucker Archives - Philip Sheldrake

4 May 2016 / 1 Comment

Workfront and the future of work

The Future of Work – Workfront Leap 2016 from Philip Sheldrake

I'm in Orlando Florida this week with the Workfront team and their partners and customers for their annual Leap conference. It's my privilege to participate in a panel session on the future of work, and to deliver a session with the more grounded title – making work suck less!

As you can see from the stack here, the first too common affront I identify and tackle is what I generally call the 'X steps to heaven' crowd. Those authors and companies proffering clickbait that teases with some relatively short sequence of steps needed to take you from zero to hero – in this context, going from a dysfunctional to awesome organization.

Bullshit. Life is complex and society is complex and all organization is complex, and authors of this sort of crap are either ignorant at best or disingenuous at worst. Complexity is a natural product that cannot be simplified – we can only aspire in this digital age to navigate it more simply.

I then go on to identify the lessons we might learn from Mother Nature, the necessity to sustain mutual value for all stakeholders, and some of the hazards we must avoid along the way, not least corporate surveillance.

Last night we were at the Magic Kingdom, and this evening we're dining at Epcot. Who said work has to suck?! :-)

Thanks for having me Workfront.

15 May 2015 / 2 Comments

Talking garbage and the purpose of business

The third in a series on the topic of the purpose of business. Follows:

Business exists to establish and drive mutual value creation. Steve Denning challenged this statement, preferring Drucker's assertion that the purpose of business is to create and keep a customer. I responded, and he has challenged my response:

we may be talking about different things: theoretical purpose of a firm and how to run it

"satisfying all the stakeholders" isn't a viable heuristic to run a firm. See Making Management as Simple as Frisbee

“satisfying all the stakeholders” was tried in mid20thC. It led to Garbage Can firms.

[tweet tweet tweet]

Garbage

Steve refers to "garbage can firms" in his Forbes article, Is The Tyranny Of Shareholder Value Finally Ending?, an eloquent take down of prioritizing the pursuit of shareholder value. When it comes to garbage it quotes a trio of academics – Cohen, March and Olsen – who in 1972 explained: Read more

7 May 2015 / 2 Comments

Debating the purpose of business

The second in a series on the topic of the purpose of business:

Steve Denning published an article to the Drucker Forum last week, How The Internet Is Forcing The Humanization Of Work, an argument founded on Drucker's assertion that the purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.

Steve found my post on the purpose of business post-Drucker via a thread with Kenneth Mikkelsen and tweeted his comments. His first quotes my re-definition of the purpose of business:

[The] Problem with "establish and drive mutual value creation" is that it doesn't tell me what anyone has to do.

and then:

"Delight customers" as the goal is crystal clear as to what everyone has to do.

and lastly:

Since power has shifted from seller to buyer, "delighting customers" sets priorities right, for firm to survive

I share Steve's optimism that we may be on the cusp of the potential to possibly humanize work (can my optimism be more tentative?!), but I cannot subscribe to his rationale. Read more

17 April 2015 / 9 Comments

What, exactly, is the purpose of business? An answer post-Drucker

The first post in what turned out to be a series of three on the topic of the purpose of business:

Peter Drucker asserted that the purpose of business is to create and keep a customer. He was right at the time in offering previously inward-looking firms a more appropriate beacon. His dictum is, however, wrong for our time.

The assertion is insufficient in sustainability terms; ie, being concerned with the health and resilience of living systems such as organizations, society and the environment. A customer-centric outlook is too simplistic, simply failing to recognise complexity, and therefore at threat from business that has progressed beyond Drucker's heuristic. Read more

24 April 2014 / 1 Comment

Doing the triple loop – profound leadership

Drucker

Peter F. Drucker asserted: "What's measured improves." I'm a sucker for measurement and organizational learning as you can see from the posts tagged as such here – perhaps it's something to do with my engineering training.

I advocate tapping extant business performance management process to effect the evolution towards social business (on this blog, on briansolis.com, on stoweboyd.com, in the Balanced Scorecard Report), and that means getting to grips with the Balanced Scorecard and similar approaches.

The lexicon of performance management often involves so-called single-loop and double-loop learning, but a third loop gets less airtime in my experience. So as we debate the types of organizational design conducive to the potential and aspirations of social business – in the Future of Work, Responsive Org and Enterprise 2.0 communities for example – I thought I'd post the following table outlining ways to think about the loops. Read more