I recently attended the Drucker Forum in Vienna, the world’s leading management conference which is held in memory of Peter Drucker, who was born in Vienna.
Drucker is said to have invented modern management and this years theme of “Management – the human dimension” would have been welcomed by Drucker. It also excited me as I believe that if you have no humanity when managing other people you will never achieve the objectives you set. Yes, you will get part way and you will have a level of success but full blown achievement of your objectives? Not a chance.
The gathering was large, I last attended three years ago and there had been about 600 people but this year saw close on 1,000 people from across the world arriving in Vienna for the conference.
There were some notable speakers that stood out for me: John Hagle III from the Deloitte’s Centre for the Edge in the USA, Thomas Bubendorfer a solo climber from Austria and a real believer that good health inspires good performance, Anthony Howard from Australia who knows that if you want to be successful, human centred leadership is a key requirement.
What made these people stand out? In my view it was the challenge that they laid down to the status quo. They recognised that if you are to move management on from the bullying concepts of the 2nd half of the 20th century things have to change. This is just not in business but in all walks of life.
This has made me think, and I have to admit that this was inspired by a quote from John Hagle’s presentation: “It all starts out so promising and then they send us to school”.
My wife is a Headteacher in a Primary school and she says: “when do people stop skipping?” What she means is when do we loose that dream and that sheer enjoyment of life? You certainly never see any adults skipping to work or skipping to the shops.
My thoughts focus upon this: we all set out to make a difference, we want to change the world so that it is a better place but somewhere along the way we end up supporting, and in some cases desperate to maintain, the status quo.
Too many people want to do things in the same old way and we all know that if we do things in the same old way we tend to get the same old results.
For far too many people the status quo can not be disturbed. They have a good lifestyle and do not want to rock the boat. They can be heard saying “We can do things that make it look like we are making a difference but let’s just keep it the same, the same beneficiaries, the same sufferers.”
Yannis Varoufakis poses the question in his book title from 2016: “The weak must suffer what they must?” This is taken from a fellow country man of Varoiufakis – Thucydides who lived about 400BC and wrote: “since you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” The fact that Varoufakis asks the question demonstrates that, in the intervening 2,400 years, we have not changed, we have not learnt.
We have to challenge the status quo, it is good to become more human at work. We have to want to make a difference so in the words of another great man, Charles Handy: “let’s start small fires in the darkness until the whole world is alight.”
Come on people, let’s make a difference. Let’s all become more human and bring that humanity to the business world until it is truly alight!