10th Global Drucker Forum 2018, Vienna, November 28-30

Citation

(2019), "10th Global Drucker Forum 2018, Vienna, November 28-30", Development and Learning in Organizations, Vol. 33 No. 1, pp. 39-41. https://doi.org/10.1108/DLO-01-2019-170

Every year the Drucker Conference is a high-profile meeting in Vienna, attracting more than 1,000 participants from business, academia, and media from all over the world. Each conference is organized around a special topic. This year it was the human dimension of management in the age of digitalization and robotization. The level of intellectual challenge was high, with contributions from experts around the globe, e.g. Charles Handy, Rosbeth Moss Kanter, and Henry Mintzberg.

Key messages

The most often used words were “complexity,” “uncertainty,” “change,” “disruption,” “creativity,” “learning,” “corporate cultures,” and “empowerment.” These words well illustrate the context of the conference. Its first major message can be summarized the following way: we live in a rapidly changing, uncertain world where new technologies disrupt traditional business models. Businesses have to navigate complexites to shape and master their future. The second message was about the answers to these challenges: the solution should be more creative, the organizations should be more flexible and humanized, and there should be better human resource management. In summary, organizations should delete “human resource management from their vocabulary altogether and substitute it with partnership.

A different kind of organization

More creative organizational cultures and more humanized organizations require a shift from traditonal, bureaucratic structures to network-based, flexible ones, which offer the opportunity for continuous learning, involvement, and creative dialogues within organizations. This should be more than the traditional business process reengineering. Business and management practice redesign is needed for creating better worker environments – warned Anthony Howard, CEO of The Confidere Group. Productivity in this world can only be improved if employees are skilled, innovative, and also motivated. However, motivation is not sufficient even in and of itself. Employees have to be driven to explore, to be curious, and to be involved in meaningful coversations about continuous improvements within the organization.

These changes – as Hal Gregersen from MIT highlighted – can be achieved only in an open, cooperative atmosphere, in which critical questions can be raised without one being afraid of any type of retaliation. Management should ask more and listen more instead of offering/imposing solutions. They have to be aware of the fact that only if they take good care of their employees will the employees take good care of customers. The success of business, at the end of the day, will depend on the human factor and on how the business is managed. Therefore increased investment into human resources is necessary at all levels of the organization despite the fact that it is obviously expensive. At this point somebody raised the question of whether it was worth spending a lot on training employees when in a globalized world, knowledge was also global, so it could easily happen that talents would move from the company that invested into training them to another organization anywhere in the world. The answer was practical: What is worse – some skilled people leave your company or those who are unskilled stay?

Jean-Dominique Senard, CEO of Michelin Group, emphasized that the management can create an inspiring environment, in which employees are encouraged to be “butterflies” rather than “ants.” Here, trust characterizes human relations, risk-taking is encouraged, failures are tolerated, and future vision and ethical guidelines determine everyday practices. In this environment, employees will probably stay happily. Consequently, it depends mainly on the management whether it can retain the best people. Managers also have to build exciting organizations with win-win situations for both the employees and the employers. As one speaker warned, creative people do not like to work in boring organizations, where they are treated as small parts of a huge machine.

A different kind of leader

John Hagel from Deloitte – among others – pointed out that having a sense of community, a sense of belonging, and a level of connectedness are also retaining factors. For all these changes to happen, the management style also has to change. As mentioned before, managers have to ask more and listen to their people more. They have to be honest and confess that they do not necessarily know what they do not know, so they also need “collective social intelligence” to be able to better manage. As another speaker said, leadership should not be only about showing the right direction to be followed by employees. It has to rather be a process of co-creating the future of business. Leaders have to deliberately build empowering cultures instead of letting these “just happen.” It means analyzing and observing the present culture continuously and planning the way to a “to be” culture. Managenal ignorance, cultural incompetence, and arrogance cannot create the right business environment for retaining and attracting talent. Digitalization and robotization will eliminate repetitive and simple jobs; therefore, reskilling and retraining individual employees is an important responsibility of a forward-looking management along with unlocking the capacity of organizations.

What could have been better?

The Conference touched upon real management challenges of our digital revolution age. However for me, as a participant from an Eastern European country, some obvious deficiencies could be observed.

Cultural diversity

While the Conference was an excellent gathering of the representatives of Western businesses, universities, and media, among the 113 speakers and session chairs, there were none from Eastern Europe. It could also be argued that Asia was underrepresented despite the fact that the Asian economy is outperforming Europe. Even among the participants, there were only a few from, for example, the so-called four “Visegrad contries” (Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary). The reason could be the high conference attendance fee. (For the three days:€ 3,570).

This is unfortunate, as management thinkers should know that there are no universal recipes. Society culture influences organizational cultures. The most innovative and excellent practice developed, let us say, in the USA, cannot be exported to another country without considering local cultural, political, and societal characteristics. This cross-cultural aspect of management was missing from the conference agenda.

People and global value chains

Another important aspect not covered was the current reality of the human aspects of global value chains, which are spreading all over the world in search of cheap locations. Eastern European countries, for example, are the cheap production locations of Western European multinationals, especially German car manufacturers. How could the new management methods and organizational cultures suggested by the conference speakers apply in these assembly operations? How can management create an inspiring, motivating work environment in such locations? What questions should local managers ask when all the key decisions are made back home in the headquarters of the companies? I believe these types of questions are relevant and should have been discussed at the conference. These critical questions will become even more relevant as assembly operations become robotized. Therefore, speakers from these countries could be partners in and “co-creators” in finding locally acceptable and efficient solutions.

What next?

The focus for next year – as annonced at the closing ceremony – will be innovation ecosystems. As efficient and successful innovation ecosystems are international and therefore culturally influenced, I hope this topic will not be addressed without widening the horizon of the conference and enriching the circle of speakers.