Insights From The 2026 The Global Peter Drucker Forum

THE Global Peter Drucker Forum is an annual international management conference, held in Vienna, Austria, dedicated to the management philosophy of Peter Drucker. This year again, they graciously broadcast live the opening session of the conference from the Vienna Hofburg. What follows are a few of the insights from that session that have been slightly edited for clarity.

Richard Straub, Founder and President, Global Peter Drucker Forum:

We are living through an astonishing technological moment. Artificial intelligence and what we increasingly call thinking machines are acquiring capabilities that only a few years ago seemed unimaginable. We should not approach this development with fear. The potential is enormous. These technologies can amplify human capacities. Give people access to knowledge and capabilities they never had before and help us make connections that we couldn’t see before. It can help us to create new knowledge and new solutions for improving our lives at an unprecedented scale. But innovation cannot be an end in itself. The question cannot only be what can we create; it must also be what is the impact of what we create on people and institutions, on markets, on society. An algorithm can optimize the route to a given objective. It cannot decide whether that objective is good. A machine can make a decision and act on it autonomously, but it cannot accept moral responsibility for the consequences. That responsibility remains ours. That is why technology must remain our servant and never become our master.

Management is not simply about change; it is about finding the right balance between continuity and change. Wise leaders must understand what needs to change, but they must also understand what should not change. Such as the foundational principles and human values on which our societies depend. Human dignity, human agency, responsibility, freedom, trust, respect for others—these are not obsolete constraints from a slower age; they are the accumulated result of long human experience and deeply ingrained in the human condition. The next generation of innovators therefore requires the next generation of management capable of combining technological prowess with human agency, innovation with responsibility, economic value with human values.

Linda Hill, Professor of Business Administration, Chair of the Leadership Initiative, HBS:

Leading innovation is actually different from leading change.

[A leader she was studying said to her], “Linda, I feel like I’m leading through a fog. What does it mean to lead when you can’t see—when you have no vision?” What I learned from him is that when you are trying to do breakthrough innovation of any sort, you are actually leading through a fog. You actually have no vision, as many of the leaders told me. They are all very visionary, but in fact, if you're trying to do something that has never been done, you don’t have the answer. So, it is really about what we refer to as way-finding. You don’t know your destination, or you don’t know how you’re going to get there, and you’re taking people on an intellectual and emotionally very complex journey to get done whatever you’re trying to get done—whatever the problem is you’re trying to solve, or the opportunity you’re trying to address.

Leading innovation is really about convincing people there’s nothing called business as usual. We’re all on this journey, and it’s emotionally very, very complicated. [The leader told the hospital staff], “I’m scared, but I trust you.” And then he spent his time focusing on how we can create the conditions in which I can invite you to be willing and able to co-create the future with me. Not follow me to the future, because I don’t know what that future is.

Leaders must play three roles as they try to create these conditions for co-creation. One is the architect. How do you build the culture and capabilities so that your organization or team can innovate time and again? The other is what we refer to as the bridger role. Mostly, you never have all that you need inside your own team or organization to get it done. So you need people who can bridge across organizational walls, or boundaries, and get access to talents or capabilities you don’t have inside your organization. And finally, you often need catalysts. Catalysts are the leaders who know how to build multi-party coalitions, often across sectors, and create movement across a whole ecosystem.

Gianpiero Petriglieri, Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour, INSEAD

We are the only species that can make things up and decide to make them real.

To make better leadership is the same as to make better art. It involves three movements. One is a movement from impulse to intent. What is the gift you are trying to bring to life and share with others? One is a movement from imposition to invitation. Are you pushing that gift on others, or are you inviting them to join you in making a certain world and bringing it to life? And the third is a movement from indulgence to intervention. Is your work just all for you and your friends? Or does it shape the culture in which you operate? And your interventions might be different. You might be strengthening a culture that was becoming too loose. You might be challenging a culture that was becoming too stuck. You might be bringing together cultures that were at odds with each other. Intent allows us to be. Invitation allows us to bond. Intervention allows us to build. And once we do all three, then we can bring people and cultures to life.

My suggestion is that one of the ways to do better is to think of our work as leaders as the work of art. As a way to bring people to life, to draw us closer, and to keep culture alive. So, stop thinking, "How do I fight the good fight?" and think instead, "How do I make better art?" That’s a lot harder, but it will make you more human and the rest of us too.

Lenka Pincot, Chief of Staff to the CEO, Project Management Institute:

Innovation is not only about adding. It’s not just addition. It’s also subtraction. Because especially now in the age of AI, we are flooded with ideas but project professionals if you want them to have clarity, focus, we need to declutter a little bit. Because otherwise they start tripping over all those new ideas—new initiatives. But without that space, we don’t create space for our future. So, this is where we need to get better—better at choosing what we should do instead of just adding and adding.

Johnny C. Taylor, Jr. SHRM-SCP, President & CEO, SHRM:

Organizations speak to the word culture a lot. “I want you to live our culture; I want you to be our culture.” Most organizations lack cultural clarity. It’s a term I use a lot. It’s the idea that I want people who fit in our culture, but we have not taken the time to actually articulate that culture—described the behaviors that make one successful or not in that culture.

I am reminded. I was once the CHRO for a Fortune 500 company, and one of my earliest assignments from the CEO: Let’s come up with a statement that defines our culture. We did this. It was myself, the general counsel, the CFO, the Chief Marketing Officer, and the CEO. So, we sat around the table, and we came up with our guiding principles—the words that describe our culture at this company. I raised my hand and said to the CEO, “Would you mind if I just tested this just a little bit with a small focus group of our employees? Grudgingly, he agreed to do it. So we bring in some employees—a random selection—and I present it the best way I can. One of the women in the back said, “BS, BS, BS, BS.” That was her first comment. She said, “This isn’t our culture. This is the culture you aspire for us to have. This is your employer brand. You are asking us to manage to a culture that doesn’t actually exist here.”

Linda Hill, Professor of Business Administration, Chair of the Leadership Initiative, HBS:

One of the things Ajay Banga talked about when he was CEO of MasterCard (now President of the World Bank) was DQ. What it means is decency quotient. So, this is a man who talks really high-level about purpose, strategy, all that, but then he said, “I just think we all need to be decent.” That is the MasterCard way. Who is going to tell the CEO I don’t want to be decent? Then he began to define what does decent mean. If someone sends you an email, you answer it. That is decent behavior. And if they don’t answer you within a week, you can assume they said yes to whatever you requested. So, he didn’t have to make any big organizational change; he just said that if they don’t answer you, they said yes. Guess what happened to the silos in the organization and the communication.