12th Global Peter Drucker Forum 2020

Peter Drucker resisted the idea of defining leadership in terms of charisma, decisiveness, or other personal attributes often seen as a key to leaders‘ success. For him, a leader was someone who had followers. The term was value-neutral: it recognized that there are good, bad, and even toxic leaders.

With its emphasis on the how and the what of work, management as a social technology has delivered huge progress through productivity gains. Leaders are expected to focus more on the who and the why -- that is, on people and purpose. In real life there is no clear-cut separation between management and leadership, but the weighting varies with different roles in the organization.

The crises we are currently enduring demand excellent management, but also create imperatives for leadership – which can succeed or fail dramatically in separating the essential from the nonessential, acting decisively in the short term, and anticipating consequences in the long term.

Major themes and questions to be addressed

The general questions at the core of the Drucker Forum 2020 are these: What can we do to raise the quality of leadership? How can we call greater numbers of people to step up and equip them better to succeed? How can we achieve better leadership everywhere?

• Myths of leadership: Clarifying and defining what it is and what it is not
• What effective leaders do: Is Drucker‘s model of the „effective executive“ still right?
• Leadership in extreme turbulence and uncertainty: Will AI and big data save us?
• Leading people: Mobilizing and developing talent inside and outside the organization
• Enabling the organization of tomorrow: From digital transformation to the capacity for self-renewal
• Are leaders born or made? Revisiting the secular question
• Leadership development: A report card for the “Leadership Industry”
• High-performance leadership: Learning from sports, gaming, high-tech startups, and the military
• Still eating strategy for breakfast? Culture and how leaders cultivate it
• Innovation and value creation: The ultimate social responsibility of the firm
• The value equation: Dealing with bad or toxic leadership
• Does Drucker’s advice for “managing oneself” still hold true? How do leaders maximize their own contributions to enterprise success?