What Peter Drucker Would Be Reading

Recent selections from around the web that, we think, would have caught Peter Drucker’s eye:

1.   Chill, You’ll Have More Aha! Moments: Ever struggle to solve a problem and find yourself getting nowhere?  Listen to some music or take a walk, advises Charles Kiefer of Innovation Associates. Maybe even go the beach. The reason, says Kiefer, is that pressuring yourself without pause causes your thoughts to go into ruts. So follow a very simple remedy: Relax. As he writes in Bloomberg Businessweek, “The more you reside in an easy-going state of mind, the more you will have insights.”

2.   Yawning Deficits Force Dutch Pension Funds to Cut Payouts: Pensions are great, if they can be paid. Unfortunately, too often, economic upheaval gets in the way of the best of plans. Latest case in point: a storm-tossed Netherlands. Reports the Financial Times: “For the Dutch, the cutbacks are the first ever in a nation which has the second largest ‘defined benefit’ system in Europe. But defined benefit provision, under which pensioners are guaranteed a portion of their salary for as long as they live, is unraveling under the pressure of the financial crisis and ensuing recession.”

3.  The New Yorker’s Epic Fail on Innovation: In his post on The New Yorker magazine’s innovation issue, Steve Denning starts kindly, praising the publication as a whole, before going on a long, sustained attack. “In effect, this issue of The New Yorker is a relic of the 20th Century,” Denning writes. “It’s all about inventions, not innovation. It says nothing about the process of innovation, except to exhibit a disinterest in, and disdain for, it.”

4.  Dx Comment of the Week: Last week, we looked at new technologies on the horizon and asked readers for their thoughts on what would be the most disruptive. Reader Daniel Pacheco sparked a lively conversation when he chose “automation of knowledge work”:

Why? Because it will make all knowledge work that can be automated redundant once it is automated. Every teacher or professor teaching the same subject year after year can be automated by using Internet technology. If computer programming (code writing) can be automated, all software programmers can be made redundant. All repetitive managerial work can be automated and all managers involved in such work made redundant.