What Peter Drucker Would Be Reading
Recent selections from around the web that, we think, would have caught Peter Drucker’s eye:
1. Three Strategies For Managing The Economy of Access: Among the many revolutionary effects of the Internet, according to Steve Denning in Forbes, was the rise of “three phenomena—the shredding of vertical value chains, the creation of vast new horizontal value chains and the social change of people preferring access to ownership.” This makes it very hard to turn a profit these days. Denning outlines three ways to deal with the up-and-comers of the new economy: Fight their existence, buy them up or play along in some other way.
2. The Art of Saying a Professional Goodbye: Now that we’re job-hopping and project-hopping more than ever, we’re also regularly having to part ways with people. Writing at the HBR Blog, Ed Batista argues that we often fail to stop and think about getting those goodbyes right. “We often miss opportunities to enjoy truly meaningful endings—instead they’re rushed and poorly planned—or we skip over them entirely, casting the old aside as we race toward the new,” he notes. To prevent that, Batista lays out five goodbye techniques that he has found to be particularly effective. No matter how you feel, says Batista, “I encourage you to persist and not allow feelings of awkwardness to dissuade you from acknowledging important endings.”
3. Study: Opportunities in Young Adulthood Linked to Later Narcissism: Just as we can be spoiled by family members, we can also be spoiled by life, coming to expect too much for ourselves. That’s much less the case for those who are young and unemployed during a recession. They learn humility that sticks with them, avoiding “later narcissism,” according to a study by Emily Bianchi of Emory University flagged by Julie Beck in The Atlantic. But this could be better for the rest of us than for the kindly non-narcissists, because narcissists, writes Bianchi, are more “effective at claiming resources for themselves.”
4. Dx Comment of the Week: Last week, when we looked at the National Climate Assessment and asked what our environmental priorities should be, reader Mike Grayson responded that they shouldn’t include climate change:
I am in favor of having a clean environment. I think recycling is a good thing. I have an organic lawn and garden—which very few of my neighbors have. But please don’t try to sell me on the politics of global warming. . . . Monsanto is more destructive to the environment and changing it faster by killing fish populations in runoff, etc., and there should be some significant efforts to restrain them and others like them. But little is likely to change because our politicians would rather have us focused on global warming than on real environmental issues.