What Peter Drucker Would Be Reading

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

1.   Jed Yueh of Delphix on Learning to Manage Yourself: “It’s not really that complex at the end of the day,” Jed Yueh, chief executive of Delphix, a software company, tells the New York Times. Yueh is talking about management, and his principles are pretty simple: Manage yourself, win wars rather than battles, and hire and fire right. On that second point, Yueh found, he could win a debate with employees, but “then they would slowly spiral into a place where they’re not really working hard because they feel demoralized.”

2.   And the Most Innovative Nation Is …: Switzerland! At least according to the Global Innovation Index 2013, published by Cornell University, INSEAD and the World Intellectual Property Organization. But the good news (at least from an American perspective) is that the United States is back in the Top 5. Ira Sager writes in Bloomberg Businessweek: “Government policymakers hoping to support innovation are leveraging local advantages to build their own innovation ecosystems instead of trying to import successful models from elsewhere, such as Silicon Valley.” 

3.  What Made Same-Sex Marriage Go Viral?: Writing at the HBR Blog, Morra Aarons-Mele, founder of Women Online and The Mission List, looks at how society so rapidly came around to the idea of same-sex marriage and found three rules of marketing: 1. “Smart marketers make it seem like ‘everyone is doing it.’” 2. “Smart marketers pick values that are hard to argue with.” 3. “Smart brands know what their customers value.”

4.  Dx Comment of the Week: Last week, when we looked at the Senate’s immigration bill and asked our readers about their views on U.S. immigration policy, reader Dr. Richard B. Mann, PhD wrote:

My grandmother, who was my best friend when I was very young, was 40 when she arrived in the U.S. and knew no English, but she studied and learned. She told me about the Old Country in English. At that time there were groups that helped people from their country of origin to learn English and become assimilated as fast as possible. . . . Then, later, politicians made it easy not to assimilate by issuing all kinds of documents in their own language. The result is that immigrants do not assimilate and live in their own little groups, and never talk to anyone not from their own country.