Global Peter Drucker Forum Podcasts by Peter Day: Recent Episodes
Peter Drucker Society
Martin Reeves is a corporate strategy specialist at BCG Boston Consulting Group, and director of the Group’s think tank the BCG Bruce Henderson Institute. He talks about applying ideas from biology to corporate thinking, and using artificial intelligence to explore the way companies really work. The Institute is pioneering ways of measuring the “vitality” of corporations, and predicting their potential..but it also uses the ideas of ancient Greek philosophers (and science fiction) to devise business strategy.
People born between 1980 and 2000--called Millennials--make up the largest living generation. Even so, they are still not being taken seriously by businesses. That’s the view of Joan Kuhl, founder of the New York-based consultancy Why Millennials Matter. She tells Peter Day why they matter..and what to do about it.
Hal Gregersen is Executive Director of the MIT Leadership Center and a Senior Lecturer in Leadership and Innovation at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He says that leaders have to learn how to ask the right questions..and so do the organisations they lead. He tells Peter Day why this is so important..and how people at the top of organisations need to avoid getting “super isolated”.
Sydney Finkelstein is professor of management at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. He tells Peter Day why finding talent--other people's talent--is a vital attribute of a great leader.
Rita Gunther McGrath is professor of management at Colombia Business School in New York and a widely published author. She tells Peter Day how maturing companies can use what she calls the "imagination factor" to grow and prosper.
One year ago, the ambitious Chinese household goods company Haier paid $5.4 billion to buy General Electric's huge American domestic appliance unit, based in Louisville, Kentucky. Bill Fischer follows Haier closely. He's professor of innovation management at IMD business school in Lausanne, Switzerland, and he tells Peter Day what's happening now in this extraordinary Chinese business.
Don Tapscott has spent 40 years charting the rising of the digital world in a series of best-selling books such as "The Digital Economy", "Wikinomic"s and "The Naked Corporation". He tells Peter Day why Blockchain is another revolution in progress.
Nilofer Merchant was born in India, but grew up in Silicon Valley, Calfornia where she pursued a very successful career. She gives Peter Day some insights into the "wild ideas" she spoke about at the Drucker Forum..including her distrust of the "Bro" culture that she thinks permeates American high tech.
Hundreds of students and young executives from all over the world take part in the annual Drucker Challenge essay contest, and the winners are heralded at the Drucker Forum. This years' theme was Human Prosperity in a Changing World. Four of the winners talk to Peter Day about their experiences, and their ideas. They are Anne Twombly from the USA; Ali Rushden Tariq, born in Pakistan but now living in Canada; Amina Mendez Acosta from The Phillipines, and Chris Maclay, born in the UK, now living and working in Kenya.
Charles Handy made his name as the champion of what he calls the modern "portfolio career": no more jobs for life. He started his working life as a business person: an oil company executive. In the 1960s he began the second stage of his portfolio career, helping to set up the London Business School. His third big job has been as an author of books about business, management and life in general. Combining striking metaphor and profound common sense, they include The Empty Raincoat, The Gods of Management, The Age of Unreason and The Second Curve. In this podcast Charles Handy reviews his own portfolio, regrets the replacement of the company by the corporation, and suggests some important things that businesses and organisations have to learn, or relearn.
Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg is an expert on innovation and a critic of how many companies try to do it the wrong way; he is co-author of the book Innovation as Usual: How to Help Your People to Bring Great Ideas to Life. Originally from Denmark, he now lives in New York where he is working on a new project trying to improve the way that the world goes about tackling its problems. Thomas W-W talks about his ideas to Peter Day, and explains what he learnt about business problem-solving from a shelter for abandoned dogs in Los Angeles.
In this second podcast, Professor Carlota Perez lists some of the things that need to be tackled in order to turn the huge uncertainties of the current technology revolution into a golden era of inclusive prosperity.
Professor Carlota Perez takes the long view of economics..the very long view. Her particular field of interest is long cycles stretching out 50 years or more, and often starting with the shock of big technology changes. She teaches at the London School of Economics, the University of Sussex, Tallinn University of Technology and University College London, and she has written a much-praised book: “Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: the Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages”. In this first podcast, she tells Peter Day about the economic cycle we are now in the middle of ... and how it’s similar to (and different from) previous big cycles which are not really understood by business people, politicians, and even economists themselves.
Vlatka Hlupic is professor of management and business at the University of Westminster in London. She's also a consultant and author of the book "The Management Shift". She tells Peter Day how companies can discover systematic ways of building humane organisations fit for innovation and prosperity in the 21st century.
Alex Adamopoulos is the founder and CEO of the international digital business consultancy Emergn Limited, based in Boston Mass. He tells Peter Day why he’s a champion of products over corporate projects..and how (in Peter Drucker’s words) “culture eats strategy for breakfast”.
Allyson Stewart-Allen studied with Professor Drucker. She tells Peter Drucker about his sustained influence and how this year’s Forum will take his ideas further.
Julia Hobsbawm says we are drowning in data and deadlines, and we need to correct the balance between the personal and the always-on networked world that has rapidly become the way that most of us live. Julia Hobsbawm was the world's first professor of networking (at the Cass Business School in London), and she's the founder of the knowledge networking firm Editorial Intelligence. She talks to Peter Day about the ideas in her new book "Fully Connected: Surviving and Thriving in an Age of Overload".
Businesses are people, profit..but first of all purpose, says Bob Collymore. He has been CEO of the mobile phone company Safaricom in Kenya since 2010. It is the company that introduced mobile money to Africa 10 years ago, under the brand name M-Pesa. What was designed as a send-money-home service for people living far from their villages has developed into a vital arm of the economy, adding microloans for solar power and micro savings for healthcare to its range of services. Bob Collymore explains what inclusive prosperity means--and might mean--in Africa.
Tammy Erickson is an author, expert on leadership and work, and an Adjunct Professor, Organisational Behaviour, at London Business School. She is the founder and CEO of Tammy Erickson Associates, a firm dedicated to helping clients build intelligent organizations. She tells Peter Day what’ss wrong with the traditional idea of leadership, and how leadership is about asking the right questions, rather than command and control. And she talks about the need for “spontaneous coordination”.
Allyson Stewart-Allen is a Californian who now lives and works in London where she is the founder and chief executive of a consultancy called International Marketing Partners. She a specialist in globalisation and its impacts, and author of the book Working with Americans. She tells Peter Day about the snags and possibilities companies may encounter in the global world.
Richard Straub worked for IBM for much of his life. He is now director of the Drucker Forum. He tells Peter Day how the Forum began, and how Professor Drucker’s ideas maintain their relevance in a much-changed business world.
Andrew Hill is management editor and associate editor of the Financial Times, where his weekly column has a wide following. He tells Peter Day about some of the notable things that have changed in his nearly three decades of reporting for the paper on business, companies and management..and the things that haven’t.
Curt Carlson was president of the research group SRI International from 1998 to 2014 and then founded a company called Practice of Innovation, teaching companies, countries and individuals how to innovate productively: “It’s about learning fast,” he says. In this Forum podcast he explains how almost anyone can be innovative..if they know how. And why Singapore is now the only learning country in the world.
Professor Gary Hamel unleashes a campaign to dismantle the bureaucracies that—he says—are clogging companies and many other organisations and stifling their productivity.
A compelling story. Debra France specialises in leadership development and learning at W L Gore and Associates, a business run on very distinctive principles. She explains them to Peter Day.
John Hagel is cofounder of the Deloitte Centre for the Edge. He explores how to think about the future when there are “at least one million people round the world who can do your job”, and what companies and other organisations need to do about it.
Jeffrey Pfeffer is professor of organisational behaviour at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University in California. He’s an expert on power and leadership. He explains that (whatever people say) command and control still makes the business world go round. And he’s got one or two tips for organisational success: one of them is flattery.
Clayton Christensen from Harvard Business School talks about his latest insights into innovation and why most corporation still don't understand it, as set out in his new book "Competing Against Luck"
Roger Martin is the director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the Rotman School of Business at the University of Toronto. He tells Peter Day why there’s an urgent need to discover new ways of funding business innovation..and why business schools are going to find themselves under disruptive pressure in the coming years.
Mariana Mazzucato of the University of Sussex sets out the vital role she thinks the State plays in driving innovation as she described in her book "The Entrepreneurial State" and why it is so little understood in many parts of the world.
Julian Birkinshaw of the London Business Schools explains why it's time to change the practice of management
Mariana Mazzucato of the University of Sussex sets out the vital role she thinks the State plays in driving innovation as she described in her book "The Entrepreneurial State" and why it is so little understood in many parts of the world.
Mary Beth Christie from Tech City in London talks about how to help high tech startups.