What Peter Drucker Would Be Reading

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

1.     Are CEOs Getting the Best From Corporate Functions?: Have you ever felt the HR and legal departments at your company were getting in the way of the business more than they were helping? It’s a common complaint, note Andrew Campbell, Sven Kunisch and Günter Müller-Stewens in MIT Sloan Management Review. But don’t blame the people in legal or HR, finance or IT. Blame the head of your company. All too many CEOs fail to provide the heads of their corporate functions with proper direction, and the results are bad for business: “Without sufficient guidance, corporate functions can become—often unintentionally—self-serving.”

2.     How to discover purpose and fulfillment: Finding what will make you leap out of bed daily with a sense of purpose isn’t a quick process for most people. But Rahiel Tesfamariam writes at the Washington Post‘s The Root DC Live that you should picture yourself 20 years out, think about what matters and learn to understand your best qualities. And if that’s not Druckerian enough for you, then be aware that Tesfamariam also recommends asking yourself the following question: “What do you want individuals to say about the way in which you lived your life?”

3.     Eric Kacou on the Rise of ‘Entrepreneurial Solutions’ in Africa:  In an interview with Knowledge@Wharton, Eric Kacou, a managing director at the OTF Group and author of Entrepreneurial Solutions for Prosperity in BoP Markets (BoP stands for “base of pyramid”), says that Africa is misunderstood and written off by far too many people. In fact, look closely and you’ll see regions that are developing rapidly thanks to smart, compassionate and profitable entrepreneurship: “Most of the entrepreneurs that I profile in the book are entrepreneurs who I believe showed this compassion and this ability to really drive for profits and generate returns, which are very, very high, while at the same time being able to demonstrate moral purpose in the way they conduct their business.”

4.     The Dx Comment of the Week: In response to our post “Whose Right?”—in which we asked when it’s proper for one nation to intervene in another nation’s internal affairs—reader Maverick18 said it’s appropriate in only very limited cases:

Intervention on the part of a U.N. force to prevent or stop genocide is appropriate. The U.S. going it alone is no longer viable, for multiple reasons, unless the situation is a direct threat to U.S. security or a U.S. ally’s security. . . . The welfare of Syrians is not a primary US concern.