The Next Management

Peter Drucker called management the organ of society, the function through which knowledge is made productive. It follows that when management falters, every institution feels the impact. That premise is why this subject is larger than corporate efficiency, and it is where the Next Management starts.

The diagnosis is uncomfortable. Facing geopolitical conflict, economic fragmentation and a technology that changes what work is, many institutions have reverted to command-and-control reflexes. Bureaucracy is back, now powered by AI-driven scorecards that monitor, measure and automate. Managing complexity by compression holds for a while. Over time it produces fragility, distrust and diminishing returns on talent.

The tempting response is a better model. The Next Management declines to supply one. “Next” is an analogy for practices better suited to current conditions rather than a fixed destination, and management theory carries an assumption that rarely survives contact with the world, that what works in one place travels to another. Drucker was clearer. Management is a practice rather than a science, and its effectiveness depends on the appropriateness of its application in a specific context rather than on the refinement of its techniques.

What replaces the model is a set of balances. Innovation and efficiency. Ecosystems and single institutions. The long view and the quarter. Augmentation and automation. Art and science. Reality and ideology. Self-renewal and revolution. Each is a spectrum rather than a choice, and finding your own position on it is the work.

Then the balances meet a real decision and the difficulty turns concrete. A CFO presents the plan. One hundred AI agents will take over the reconciliations, the first-draft reports, the month-end close. The headcount math is clean, the savings are real, and several capable people will be made redundant. Around the table everyone agrees the firm should keep people at the center. Nobody can say what that means for the decision in front of them.

The phrase is true, comfortable, and useless. It does not tell the CFO which roles to protect, the board what to measure, or the CEO why the human option is more than sentiment. Good intentions lose to arithmetic. Drucker's premise, the balances, and the traditions converging on human dignity all give a leader the ground to stand on and the language to argue. None of them yet gives her the spreadsheet.

The Drucker Forum introduced the Next Management as a theme in early 2023. Johan helped initiate it and has contributed since, and he is now working on the measures the argument still lacks. Few leaders argue that management should stop being human. The unsettled question, and the one that decides actual outcomes, is whether anyone in the room can say what staying human requires of the decision on the table. That is the challenge we now share.