HBR: Channeling Peter Drucker on Today's Crises

Great thinkers often are clairvoyants, too. With their deep understanding of the past and present, they can spot future trend lines as they converge toward the horizon.

Peter Drucker, one of the great minds of business management, who died in 2005, was one of these savants. So Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter was asked by Harvard Business Review to look at today's business environment and consider what Drucker would say.

Here are several of her conclusions:

• Executive Bonuses. "He held that the role of executives was to coordinate the actions of others whose motivation (and thus compensation) was necessary to get the job done. But he also held that pay should be associated with performance; that was a major point of management by objectives, perhaps his best-known practical management contribution."
• American Auto Industry. "Years ago, he warned of troubles ahead if GM executives remained stuck in memories of previous successes and failed to ask his famous 'what to stop doing' question. GM was an iconic example of failure to see the need for significant innovation; its structure had become ossified, and its top management couldn't consider a change."
• U.S. as Global Competitor. "Drucker sounded early warnings that competition from emerging markets would eventually challenge the United States' global economic dominance. He observed that newer economic powers were adopting American management lessons that Americans were forgetting, as his own ideas spread widely and were consumed eagerly in countries with aspirations to grow their economies."

It's an interesting read. Check out What Would Peter Say?