What Peter Drucker Would Be Reading
Recent selections from around the web that, we think, would have caught Peter Drucker’s eye:
1. Why Good Managers Are So Rare: As Peter Drucker stressed, having effective managers is the key to organizational performance. Yet companies fail to choose the candidate with the right talent for the job 82% of the time. This problem is laid out at the HBR Blog by Randall Beck and James Harter of Gallup. Their advice: Pick your managers more carefully. “Experience and skills are important, but people’s talents—the naturally recurring patterns in the ways they think, feel and behave — predict where they’ll perform at their best,” they write.
2. Prime Is the Future of Amazon: With the subscription service Amazon Prime, Amazon.com customers who are willing to fork over $79 annually can get most two-day shipping for free. But Amazon’s feeling the pinch enough to raise the subscription price to $99 a year. Derek Thompson, a senior editor at The Atlantic, thinks it’s a sensible move, but adds that Amazon’s in big trouble if the new rate is spurned by consumers: “How would investors continue to justify a quasi-infinite price-earnings ratio for a company whose best customers refuse to pay another $0.40 per week?”
3. Spain Adopts the ‘Israel Model’ to Engineer a Biotech Resurgence: Spain is a leader in biotech research, but it lags when it comes to the creation of new companies. One thing that might be lacking, according to an article in Knowledge@Wharton, is a sufficiently entrepreneurial culture. For that reason, some Spaniards are looking to the other end of the Mediterranean for some inspiration from Israel. The article reports that the Spanish government “is focusing on the Israeli biotech sector—a world leader in creating start-ups—as the inspiration for designing an entrepreneurial and business model based on innovation.”
4. Dx Comment of the Week: Last week, when we asked what could be done to make foundations more adventurous in their grant making, reader Geert Eenink had the following to say:
Foundations have to look to the future and the way the world is changing around them. At least once a year their management must ask the customers what they expect of the foundation and what they miss. That will help to creating a path to innovation and reserve budget of it. There is always something to develop.