What Peter Drucker Would Be Reading

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

1. Proof That It Pays to Be America’s Most-Hated Companies: It’s too depressing, so we’ll say we’re skeptical. Eric Chemi takes to Bloomberg Businessweek to examine customer satisfaction versus stock returns. Drawing on research by the American Customer Satisfaction Index, Chemi finds that customer satisfaction is not correlated to higher stock returns—in fact, customer dissatisfaction seems more helpful to stock returns (at least looking at one year’s worth of data). Hmmm. Maybe it’s time to load up on American Airlines shares after all.

2. The Surprisingly High Cost of Bull in Today’s Workplace: Writing in Forbes, Steve Denning takes stock of The Age of Bull, in which we live, and pronounces it bad not only for our morals but for our prosperity. Our organizations have become increasingly dysfunctional, and we lack the clarity even to talk about it. What helps to fix the problem? “Radical transparency is at the heart of it,”  Denning suggests. “It entails different ways of thinking, speaking and acting in the workplace.”

3. Doing Less, Leading More: It’s an old lesson but a good one: As you move up the ranks, you’re not going to be doing what got you there in the first place. That’s up to others. So stop being a “Doer-in-Chief,” advises Ed Batista in the HBR Blog. “Continuing to rely on our abilities as individual contributors greatly limits what we actually contribute and puts us at a disadvantage to peers who are better able to mobilize and motivate others,” he writes. “In other words we need to do less and lead more.”

4. Dx Comment of the Week: Last week, we looked at the lessons learned by Coca-Cola CEO Muhtar Kent on doing business in India and asked how the country’s business sector may evolve over the next decade. Reader Vaibhav Manek had the following to say:

Multinational corporations that have localized are doing extremely well. Domino’s Pizza India franchise is today one of the two largest businesses in their organization. McDonald’s India is a very profitable venture after 10 years of working on getting it right, with localized vegetarian items on the menu. And so are the Unilevers of the world.

India will further see a metamorphosis into a strong, fast-growing economy with high demographic dividend in the next decade, and the Indian multinational corporation and foreign multinational corporation will both co-exist and prosper.