rethinkchronicles

It is time for the annual rite of attempts to forecast what will happen in the new year. In his book Rethinking the Corporation, Forler Massnick quotes Winston Churchill’s complaint, “The future is one damn thing after another.” Peter Drucker put an academic spin on it, “”Forecasting is not a respectable human activity and not [...]

A prominent billionaire business man has issued a call to arms to American businesss leaders to “get off their butts” and go on the offensive and play a leading role in helping solve the nation’s economic problems. Peter G. Peterson, former Commerce secretary, CEO of Bell and Howell, and cofounder of the Blackstone Group, urges [...]

Reacting to the tenor of the times, scholars and commentators are focusing on what could be called the “muddle in the middle”. Society seems to be like a child attempting to jump a puddle and instead landing kersplash in the middle. Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kantor writes about change being hardest in the [...]

In an age in which the average tenure of CEOs has shrunk to about five years, and theories about how to manage successfully through economic turmoil have the lifespan of a tsetse fly, it is interesting to reflect on the amazingly prophetic writings of Peter Drucker who died nearly four years ago at the age [...]

Harvard Professor Rakesh Khurana, who teaches a doctoral seminar on management and is an expert on the CEO labor market, writes caustically that we should not be surprised at the rise of corporate malfeasance.
He advocates rejuvenating intellectually and morally the training of our future business leaders.  Khurana contends that university-based business schools were founded to [...]

While corporate executives struggle with a recession-induced miasma of layoffs, plant closings, inventory reductions and balance sheet issues, there is a soft drumbeat in the background that is hazardous to ignore.
Jack and Suzy Welch, in their regular column in Business Week, put it this way, “throw some time and energy into figuring out what your [...]

It has long been a truism that the art of management is knowing the right questions to ask.  The key question in today’s business environment is “do you know your company’s cash position every day, even every hour?”
In his new book Leadership in the Era of Economic Uncertainty the highly regarded consultant Ram Charan [...]

Peter Drucker, the professor, author and consultant who revolutionized the theory of management, was amazingly prescient, having the ability to foresee the future. He has been dead for more than three years, but his ideas live on.
He was spot-on in describing what is now being experienced in the economy, and slotted it into historical perspective.  [...]

The distinguished scientist Ray Kurzweil contends that machines will surpass human processing capability, and thus become the most significant intelligent force on Earth.  This dramatic change, he believes, is imminent.
“The intelligence that will emerge,” he wrote, “will continue to represent the human civilization, which is already a human-machine civilization.  This will be the next step [...]

Self healing paint developed at the University of Illinois covers its own scratches with no external intervention, according to a story in the MIT Technology Review. It has the ability to protect cars, bridges, and ships from corrosion.
The self-healing elements, enclosed in mirocapsules that rip open when the coating is scratched, are compatible with a [...]