What Peter Drucker Would Be Reading
Recent selections from around the web that, we think, would have caught Peter Drucker’s eye:
1. Builders Hold Lotteries for Eager New Homebuyers: Remember the housing bubble and crash? Yesterday’s worries. People are buying houses again, and they’re lining up to do it. In some developments, reports CNNMoney, demand is so high that potential buyers must enter a lottery to be allowed to purchase a house. “We went years without having to resort to lotteries or camping out,” says Marcie DePlaza of GL Homes. “We’re thrilled to see them back.”
2. Explainer: How Corruption Is Strangling U.S. Innovation: One of the best ways to beat competitors, if you can afford it, is regulating them to death. Over at the HBR Blog, James Allworth makes the case for how money in politics is discouraging disruptive innovation in new businesses. “Tesla. Uber. Netflix. Most economies would kill to have a set of innovators such as these,” writes Allworth. “And yet at every turn, these companies are running headlong into regulation (or lack thereof) that seems designed to benefit incumbents.”
3. Should Local Government Be Run Like Silicon Valley?: Silicon Valley has proven to be a fertile place for new ways of doing business and getting rich. Meanwhile, local government around the country has often been a fertile place for seeing tax dollars used ineffectively. That’s why a San Francisco-based nonprofit called Code for America (CfA) is sending brainiacs out to various parts of the country to spread the Silicon Valley magic. Reports John Buntin in Governing: “Louisville and other cities, such as Boston and Philadelphia, have used their partnerships with CfA as part of a conscious effort to seed Silicon Valley virtues, such as creativity, speed and experimentation, in local government.”
4. Dx Comment of the Week: Last week, when we discussed Peter Drucker’s “do no harm” principle of business ethics—effectively the Hippocratic Oath—and asked our readers what they thought of GE’s decision to get partially out of the business of gun financing, several wrote to say they considered our premise to be biased against gun rights. One was reader Brady, who said:
In the United States, firearms serve a need for citizens in the defense of self and others – and, contrary to the above characterization, the empowerment so enabled by the Constitution is seen by many as having a positive effect. If firearms are misused, the fault rests with the one who committed the act – not the rest of the population who keep and use them lawfully, nor the seller or manufacturer who serve their customers acting within the bounds of the law. If one is to apply Drucker’s Hippocratic Oath to everything, how did he feel about the defense industry – or even the military?