What Peter Drucker Would Be Reading
Recent selections from around the web that, we think, would have caught Peter Drucker’s eye:
1. The Rise of Indie Capitalism: Don’t think that the marchers in Occupy Wall Street are opposed to the market economy, writes New School professor Bruce Nussbaum in Bloomberg Businessweek. They just oppose cronyism and prefer smaller-scale startups and local businesses. “Indie Capitalism is a post-global, local economic phenom (think 3D printing, locavore eating, and crowdfunding new products),” Nussbaum explains. “Indie capitalists are über-urban, too, feeding off the cultural/entrepreneurial energy of cities.”
2. Switzerland’s Resounding Verdict Against High Executive Pay: When one overpaid executive left his ailing company with a particularly gilded parachute, the Swiss decided they’d had enough. Soon after, extensive limits on certain types of executive pay followed, and even the European Parliament has capped the salaries of bankers. The response from those in the banking world has been warnings of an exodus. Steve Denning in Forbes says good riddance: “The thought never seemed to have occurred to this pin-striped apologist that if overpaid potentates packed their bags and departed for kinder climes, the rest of the economy would be just fine, and probably healthier.”
3. The Absurd Backlash Against Sheryl Sandberg’s ‘Lean In’: Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, author of Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, hadn’t even released her book before the backlash began. Critics have accused Sandberg of engaging in shallow self-promotion and blithely telling women to suck it up. Writing in The Daily Beast, Michelle Goldberg speculates on the source of the backlash. “These attacks, largely divorced from anything Sandberg has actually written or said, mean that there’s already a lot of public misunderstanding of her book’s message,” Goldberg writes. “One would think she was peddling a multilevel marketing scheme, not the most overtly feminist mainstream business book ever written.”
4. Dx Comment of the Week: Last week, when we discussed upcoming budget cuts in Washington, reader Richard Straub had this to say:
“The welfare state was conceived as a key initiative to preserve human dignity in the new industrial world of the 19th and 20th century. Albert Schweitzer was one of the great thinkers pointing out the humanity-spanning value of the reverence for life and dignity. Peter Drucker fully shared this view, but he saw the dangers of the ‘fat’ welfare state. We have now a situation in Europe where those most in need don’t get enough support but those who can take care of themselves are taking advantage of the nice add-on welfare that is spent on them without justification. This is the best way to put the future of their own children and grandchildren in jeopardy.”