Unfiltered Meservy

THE 10th annual Global Peter Drucker Forum was held in November 2018 in Drucker’s home town of Vienna, Austria. This year’s theme was Management: The Human Dimension. The following are 35 quotes from the two-day event that are worth reflecting on:

► Innovation doesn’t happen by one person having an aha moment.—Linda Hill, Harvard Business School

► It is the age of the employees. Trust them and they will create magic.—Vineet Nayar, Sampark Foundation

► The most important person is not the CEO, but the person facing a challenge.—Isaac Getz, ESCP Europe Business School

► You can consume time or you can harvest time. When you meet people you harvest time.—Charles Édouard Bouée, Roland Berger

► You can outsource your work, but you cannot outsource your responsibility.—Paul Polman, Unilever

► We need to stay in touch with people. Go out to society and find out what are the feelings of people towards your business.—Isabelle Kocher, Engie

► Executives need to get out of the building and get into the streets where the hustle is. Leadership should shift from hierarchy to hustle.—Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Harvard Business School

► Move to the next step. Try some new things and get out of the robotic way. Try getting a little foolish.—Herminia Ibarra, London Business School

► CEOs should spend some time on a retreat and reflect, read Plato, think more of philosophy.—Adrian Wooldridge, The Economist

► We must be careful that our humanity is not swamped by the digital revolution.—Charles Handy, Social Philosopher

► We spend a lot of time with leaders telling them what to do, but we don’t tell them what to stop.—Marshall Goldsmith, Business Educator & Executive Coach

► A leader today is someone who creates an environment that other people choose to join and do their best in.—Tamara Erickson, London Business School

► Think of yourself as an artist. It gives you the ability to love, learn and lose it! We need a story that moves us and a space that holds us.—Gianpiero Petriglieri, INSEAD

► Today, businesses are in permanent crisis mode. The CEO needs to take up the leadership challenge to help others respond to that.—Constantijn Van Oranje, Special Envoy Startup Delta

► Management has maybe become too machine smitten.—Julia Kirby, Senior Editor, Harvard University Press

► Many managers mix up formulating a strategy and developing a plan.—Tim Brown, President and CEO, IDEO

► Busyness means that you are not in control of your time.—Dorie Clark, Adjunct Professor Duke University

► Capitalism is on the way to destroying itself unless it starts taking responsibility for its effect on society.—Philip Kotler, Professor, Kellogg School of Management

► Activism is good if it fits your company’s values. Otherwise: Keep your ego under control.—Peter Oswald, CEO, Mondi Group

► It’s not about fixing capitalism. It’s about fixing society.—Henry Mintzberg, Professor, McGill University

► If you push solutions onto a problem effects may be temporary and short-lived. The power of pull uses internal capabilities and create long-lasting impact.—Efosa Ojomo, Research Fellow, Clayton Christensen Institute

► Leadership is a distributed capability throughout the organization.—David Ulrich, Professor, University of Michigan

► The three keys of successful transformation are leadership, talent and culture. Talent works at the speed of culture.—Renata Lerch, VP, Scrum Alliance

► If you want to create a movement, you need two things: a sense of ownership and a sense of community.—Ricardo Vargas, Executive Director, Brightline Initiative

► Institutions change when we change. When we trade resignation for indignation.—Gary Hamel, Consultant and Professor London Business School

► Companies and workers win from fundamentally redefining work: for the first time workers are doing work that human beings should be doing.—John Hagel, Co-Chairman Deloitte Center for the Edge

► Define a purpose and then create the culture that drives that purpose.—Paul Kasimu, Director of Resources, Safaricom

► Productivity and efficiency are challenges of the 20th century. Iconic companies of the future move on to the next challenge now: Mobilizing intelligence. Basically: Thinking!—Tammy Erickson, Adjunct Professor, London Business School

► You can hire great people and turn them into mediocre or extraordinary performers. It depends on the choices leaders make and the eco-systems they create.—Professor Bill Fischer, Professor of Innovation Management IMD

► If you want better performance: 1. Adopt mindfulness; 2. Get enough sleep; 3. Stop multi-tasking.—Rasmus Hougaard, Managing Director, Potential Project

► The great question of our age is: How do we rebuild trust in the state, trust in authority?—Andrew Keen, Entrepreneur and Author

► What could be a more human endeavor than management? And yet we often approach it with an engineering mindset.—Julia Kirby, Senior Editor, Harvard University Press

► Power is not given to you by hierarchy. Power is yours when you take the initiative.—Xavier Huillard, Chairman and CEO, VINCI Group

► You don’t get innovation without diversity and conflict.—Linda Hill, Professor Harvard Business School

► Surely there are things that can’t be measured; that can’t be digitized. At my best I have imagination and vision. I have dreams. I have hope. I have trust and empathy. I have commitment. I have possibilities. I have all these things that make me interesting. That make life worth living. And work worth doing. So aren’t we lucky that these can’t be measured because otherwise if the organization were purely digitized, purely went through numbers, it would be a very dreary place—a prison for the human soul.—Charles Handy, Social Philosopher* * *

Source Reference:

https://jscheideler.com/35-leadership-quotes-from-the-10th-global-peter-drucker-forum/