Humanistic Management for an Entrepreneurial Society

Late management consultant and author Peter Drucker always insisted that a precondition of a free and functioning society was a set of performing organisations and institutions capable of effectively fulfilling their missions. The alternative was chaos and revolution that would inexorably lead to tyranny. This was why he singled out management as so important for society, not just for business.

COVID-19 continues to stress-test management to its limits. But some conclusions are already clear. One welcome surprise is the resilience of business. The remarkable thing overall is not that some companies have perished in sectors such as hospitality and travel that have effectively been cancelled. As the economic statistics demonstrate, what is remarkable is that so many are still alive and kicking – a testament to entrepreneurial optimism, managerial adaptability and the will to survive.

Leadership quality has amplified success and failure alike. On the negative side, it has become clear that most governments could not live up to the challenge of crisis management – being caught in botched, vacillating or panicky decision-making and flawed execution. The media played their part in spreading the negatives only as opposed to communicating balanced information. For the public sector, it became apparent how things become worse as you move up the hierarchy – from the municipal to ministerial level and to the political sphere with the ultimate failures at the European Union level where the bureaucratic mindset and a lack of managerial competencies caused significant harm to European citizens.

Conversely, we should take positive lessons from public-private partnerships such as the development of a vaccine, crowned by a once-in-a-century success story that underlined the power of cooperation to leverage existing strengths. Equally, mass vaccination programmes attest to the wisdom of drafting in expert implementation and logistics experience to complement health sector competence. No country has got it all right, however. There is much still to learn, particularly in global cooperation to vaccinate the populations of poorer countries.