What Peter Drucker Would Be Reading

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

1.  Are You Sleeping With Your Smartphone?: We may begrudge the invasiveness of our communications gadgets, but we’re the enablers, writes Leslie A. Perlow on the HBR Blog. By feeling pressured to respond to work at all times, weekday or weekend, we enable the crowding out of all down time, much to our disadvantage: “When we are trapped, we don’t think about better, faster and more effective ways of working.”

2.  Failure and the Giving Pledge: The business world understands that failure is essential to learning. But non-profits refuse to admit failure, according to the writers at Philanthrocapitalism.com, which makes them more likely to be both dishonest and risk-averse: “Philanthropy, by contrast, has long missed out on the feedback loop from failure that is so valuable to business, and so often ends up frittering away scarce resources on projects that someone else has already found wanting.”

3.  Envisioning the Future With Student Designers: What will the future look like? To answer, the folks at Herman Miller worked with students from two U.S. design schools, Cranbrook and Pratt. “Cranbrook students contemplated the challenges of the modern office, imagining a work culture in which living and working blend even more deeply than they do today,” David Foster explains on Herman Miller’s Discover Blog. “The students at Pratt sought to create designs that balance body and mind in ways that potentially increase health benefits and elevate mood and productivity while providing a greater degree of personal satisfaction from the user experience.”

4.  The Dx Comment of the Week: In response to our post “Healthy Changes,” in which we asked about fixes the U.S. should make to its healthcare system, reader Will Garand had this to say:

Wellness starts with education and awareness, and perhaps the foundation is leading the way towards more effective engagement with our health by challenging our assumption that when the patient is sick it’s all about the treatment. Prevention comes from individual commitments to healthy living and effective treatment of an illness still needs that individual commitment to be at its core.