What Peter Drucker Would Be Reading

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

1. Up to Speed: 5 Things to Know About Mary Barra, GM’s First Female CEO: In an industry not known for many female top executives, Mary Barra is making a lot of news as the first female CEO of General Motors. The Daily Beast offers a quick biographical rundown on someone who is sure to get a lot more coverage in the coming days. It also notes that the company still faces major problems: “International operations are lagging, auto demand in the vital European market is chronically weak, the company must figure out how to lower costs to compete in India and China, and it faces aggressive competition in its home market.”

2. The Volcker Rule Will Not Work:  Banks may complain about the severity of the so-called “Volcker Rule,” which the heads of U.S. financial regulatory agencies put in place today in order to rein in proprietary trading by big banks. But they won’t really mean it, says Ted Kaufman in Forbes, because the rule is really one of “the great pieces of Swiss cheese in regulatory history.” To Kaufman’s dismay, “The tattered remains of the rule Paul Volcker envisioned, as promulgated today, will do very little to stop too-big-to-fail banks from engaging in high-risk trading with FDIC-insured deposits.”

3. Why the Left-leaning Nelson Mandela Was Such a Champion of Free Markets: In prison, Nelson Mandela was feared to be an unreconstructed Marxist. And after his release, Mandela did stay friendly with former allies in the Communist world. But his economic policy mostly turned out to be of the free-market variety. Jake Bright writes in Quartz: “While there is much work to be done in South Africa toward Mandela’s initial goals of balancing open markets with income equality, his country’s economic successes stand as yet another example of good decisions he made early on paying dividends down the road.”

4. Dx Comment of the Week: Last week, when we asked readers whether they anticipated becoming customers of solar power, reader Judie Forbes wrote the following:

In 1977 I designed a patio cover with solar panels as the roof to heat the pool and hot tub. After a couple of months getting it approved by the city, the scenic zone corridor commission and the home owners association, the latter two of which had rules against any rooftop installations, I realized that few would have similar systems. But I persisted, and the system was built and worked wonderfully. Few of the issues with being a solar power customer are technology-related.