What Peter Drucker Would Be Reading
Recent selections from around the web that, we think, would have caught Peter Drucker’s eye:
1. A Very European Country: Europeans yesterday went to the polls to elect members of the European Parliament, and across the continent the trends seem to be in the direction of increased nationalism and decreased globalization. In short, more home, less Brussels. Some call it a rise of xenophobia. The Economist says this isn’t an English story or a French story but a story of class division that would have been very familiar to Peter Drucker: “In provincial towns, villages and suburbs around the continent, people whose jobs and livelihoods have been disrupted by immigration, outsourcing and automation no longer fit into the same social democratic ‘big tent’ as urban professionals, ethnic minority voters, students and public-sector workers.”
2. Big Questions Hang Over Piketty’s Work: It is one of the best-selling books on economics in years, lauded by many for deeply exploring and explaining a problem that, in some eyes, has come to mark our age: income inequality. Capital in the Twenty-First Century by the economist Thomas Piketty has posed uncomfortable questions and offered even more uncomfortable answers. But Chris Giles of the Financial Times has found alleged errors in the book, and the FT editorial page seems to be close to dismissing Piketty’s argument in full: “Taken together, these problems seem to undermine his conclusion that wealth inequality is rising in the U.S. and in Europe.”
3. Here’s What Mary Meeker Said About the Internet 10 Years Ago—And What She’ll Tackle Tomorrow: Few people have been as on-the-money about future trends in technology as venture capitalist Mary Meeker, writes SlideShare Managing Editor Marisa Wong at LinkedIn. In anticipation of a presentation by Meeker this week at the Code Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, Wong lays out some of Meeker’s greatest Internet Trends reports over the past decade or so.
4. Dx Comment of the Week: Last week, when we considered news of U.S. indictments of Chinese economic spies and asked what might be done about such espionage in general, reader Maverick 18 had this to say:
It is much too late to boycott Chinese exports. If we were to do that, Walmart and most large retailers would have to lay off most of their workforces. What we need to do is to rally our allies and engage the Chinese on the difficult topic of economic espionage at the U.N. That will also be a good test as to whether the U.N. still has any purpose or significance, or simply has become OBE [overcome by events] and useless.