35 Leadership Quotes from the 10th Global Peter Drucker Forum

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.

► It is the age of the employees. Trust them and they will create magic.

► The most important person is not the CEO, but the person facing a challenge.

► You can consume time or you can harvest time. When you meet people you harvest time.

► You can outsource your work, but you cannot outsource your responsibility.

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

► Executives need to get out of the building and get into the streets where the hustle is. Leadership should shift from hierarchy to hustle.

► Move to the next step. Try some new things and get out of the robotic way. Try getting a little foolish.

► CEOs should spend some time on a retreat and reflect, read Plato, think more of philosophy.

► We must be careful that our humanity is not swamped by the digital revolution.

► We spend a lot of time with leaders telling them what to do, but we don’t tell them what to stop.

► A leader today is someone who creates an environment that other people choose to join and do their best in.

► 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.

► Today, businesses are in permanent crisis mode. The CEO needs to take up the leadership challenge to help others respond to that.

► Management has maybe become too machine smitten.

► Many managers mix up formulating a strategy and developing a plan.

► Busyness means that you are not in control of your time.

► Capitalism is on the way to destroying itself unless it starts taking responsibility for its effect on society.

► Activism is good if it fits your company’s values. Otherwise: Keep your ego under control.

► It’s not about fixing capitalism. It’s about fixing society.

► 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.

► Leadership is a distributed capability throughout the organization.

► The three keys of successful transformation are leadership, talent and culture. Talent works at the speed of culture.

► If you want to create a movement, you need two things: a sense of ownership and a sense of community.

► Institutions change when we change. When we trade resignation for indignation.

► Companies and workers win from fundamentally redefining work: for the first time workers are doing work that human beings should be doing.

► Define a purpose and then create the culture that drives that purpose.

► 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!

► 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.

► If you want better performance: 1. Adopt mindfulness; 2. Get enough sleep; 3. Stop multi-tasking.

► The great question of our age is: How do we rebuild trust in the state, trust in authority?

► What could be a more human endeavor than management? And yet we often approach it with an engineering mindset.

► Power is not given to you by hierarchy. Power is yours when you take the initiative.

► You don’t get innovation without diversity and conflict.

► 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.

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Posted by Michael McKinney at 07:23 AM
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