UNILEVER CEO TO SPEAK AT 2012 DRUCKER FORUM

Paul Polman, the chief executive of Unilever, has been added to the roster of speakers at this year’s Global Peter Drucker Forum, to be held in Vienna on Nov. 15 and 16.

The theme of the 2012 Forum is “Capitalism 2.0: New Horizons for Managers,” and it’s in this context that Polman will speak on the subject of “business as a force for good.”

Paul Polman

“Polman’s remarks will tie into what the late C.K. Prahalad indicated at our Forum in 2009: Business must be an instrument of social justice,” said Richard Straub, the president of the Peter Drucker Society Europe, which is an affiliate of the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University.

Rick Wartzman, the Drucker Institute’s executive director, noted that Polman joins what he called “an already extraordinary roster of speakers and panellists,” including Patrick Deconinck, senior vice president for Western Europe at 3M; Peter Y. Solmssen, a member of the Management Board at Siemens; and Patrick de Cambourg, the president of Mazars.

Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, who was named last year by Thinkers 50 as the No. 6 management thinker in the world, will deliver the Forum’s opening keynote: “Can Capitalism Be Fixed?”

A number of other leading management thinkers will also have prominent roles at the Forum. Among them: Tammy Erickson, the London Business School’s Lynda Gratton, Havas Lab director and author Umair Haque and John Quelch, the dean of the China Europe International Business School (CEIBS).

The Forum will feature practical discussions on models that move beyond “maximizing shareholder value,” scholarly input based on a call for academic papers, and the perspective of younger people who participated in the Peter Drucker Challenge, a global essay contest.

“We are humbled that the Global Peter Drucker Forum is now recognized around the world as a premier venue to wrestle with key issues of management and society,” Straub said. “No one can provide easy answers to today’s greatest challenges, but we can have a serious dialogue that at least begins to move us in the right direction.”