What Peter Drucker Would Be Reading

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

1.  15 Ways to Solve the Budget Impasse: It’s an age-old problem: You’re a global superpower that’s in government shutdown and at risk of debt default. As Washington hurtles toward possible disaster, can Democrats and Republicans save the day? Knowledge@Wharton asked several “top negotiation experts for their ideas on how to solve this impasse.” Among the ideas was this one from G. Richard Shell: “Ask Presidents Clinton and Bush to co-mediate the dispute.”

2.  Dear Dying Crackberry, I Haven’t Forgotten Your Pleasures: How can a company go from one of the world’s hottest and fastest-growing in 2009 to one in seemingly terminal decline in 2013? That’s what a mystified Andrés Martinez ponders at Zócalo Public Square, even as he recounts the magic and joys of the early days of the Blackberry. “On the whole, it’s hard not to sympathize with Blackberry,” Martinez writes. “This is not your classic ‘What were they thinking??’ case of sluggishness.”

3.  What Gets Measured in Education: The White House wants to promote performance-based ratings of colleges. But what is performance, and how do we measure it? Writing at HBR Blog, Alan Kantrow notes that current measurements focus heavily on graduation rates and costs. “But these are not measures of educational performance,” he notes. “These measure only the efficiency of the educational process.” In short: They gauge “everything except the one thing that matters most: student learning.”

4.  Dx Comment of the Week: Last week, when we asked about the extended adolescence endured by educated but underemployed young Americans today, reader Francisco G Nobrega had the following to say:

A growing number of scholars have shown the modern decoupling between productivity and employment. Modern machine learning and artificial intelligence are fast eliminating jobs. Societies will have to create a new paradigm: income unlinked to pay. A minimum income has to be granted to everyone, unconditional and permanent.