What Peter Drucker Would Be Reading

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

1.         Instead of Making Resolutions, Dream: If you’re rushing right into New Year’s resolutions to drink coffee less or to exercise more, then you’re probably missing an important step, argues Whitney Johnson, a co-founder of Rose Park Advisors, in a post at the HBR Blog. “You can’t know what resolution you need until you know what your objective is,” she writes. And that objective comes from thinking more broadly about what your biggest hopes and dreams are. “So, dream,” she adds.

2.        The Fiscal Cliff Deal: Reax: We know this is a roundup, so we tend not to link to other roundups. But when New Year’s Eve sees a complex deal negotiated in Congress in order to avert the “fiscal cliff,” reading a variety of informed reactions seems like the best way to make sense of it. Over at The Daily Beast, Andrew Sullivan offers a good selection, with feedback from Greg Ip, Scott Galupo, Noam Scheiber, Paul Krugman, Jonathan Chait, Ryan Lizza, Josh Marshall and Ross Douthat.

3.      Bond Craze Could Run Its Course in New Year: After the economic turmoil of 2008, nearly everyone sought financial safety. The preferred investment was bonds. More than a quarter of household investments are now in bonds, compared with just 14% in 2007. But, reports the New York Times, many experts believe we’re due for a pendulum swing. It could even be a good thing: “This year the forecasters are being joined by many economic optimists who argue that a strengthening American economy is likely to make investors willing to embrace the risks involved in stocks, luring them out of bonds.”

4.     Dx Comment of the Week: Last week, examining the soul-searching going on within the Republican Party, we asked how a party out of power should go about rethinking itself. Reader Dave Coffaro had this to say:

The party needs to ask questions Peter Drucker would have asked: Who is our customer (in this case, constituent), what do they value and how does our party provide it? . . . Polls said that the majority of voters (those choosing Obama and those that voted for Romney) viewed Romney as a stronger leader and better qualified to deal with the economy, the deficit and the debt. Still, Romney lost, and I believe the perception that he didn’t ‘connect’ with the average voter really means he didn’t present a compelling value proposition. To appeal to a broad, diverse marketplace of voters in the future, Republicans must develop a compelling value proposition.