PETER DRUCKER – Rodenberg Tillman & Associates

Managing the present versus managing the future

November 15, 2017

Professor Jaap Koelewijn’s quote is telling, pointing out that a number of multinationals may be reaching the end of their company life-cycle. The financial press reports that an increasing number of hedge funds put heavy pressure on those boards of management to divest and/or to split up their companies to meet shareholder value. Management’s answer throughout 2017 has typically been to make ‘unrealistic’ promises that they will somehow succeed in meeting shareholder expectations. In addition, they took the easy and relatively straightforward way forward of cost-cutting and increasing consumer prices.

Defense and offense data, and crucial other dimensions

August 15, 2017

Joseph Rodenberg

A World View, Intelligence Briefings

The IT-world would like us to believe that Big Data is a success, with the emergence of all kind of data-management functions, data scientists, chief data officers and others. You might ask yourself how effective all of this is in the absence of a coherent strategy for organizing, governing, analyzing and deploying an organization’s information needs. The quote by the renowned author of the famous book “The Black Swan” is also clear in this regard. In the 2017 May/June issue of Harvard Business Review, Thomas Davenport draws a distinction between data defense and offense, and other crucial dimensions.

Are multinationals at the end of their Company Life-Cycle?

August 1, 2017

Joseph Rodenberg

A World View, Intelligence Briefings

The potential hostile takeovers of Unilever and AkzoNobel were a wake-up call for their respective boards of management and boards of directors, providing a reason for both companies to act, however, both moved in the wrong direction, by selling-off parts of their companies, and of course via cost-cutting. Two easily-implemented actions which helped improve shareholder value. The Big Egos at the top were no doubt very proud of themselves to have made a decision. Together with my co-author, Dr. Antoinette Rijsenbilt, we described those too Big Egos in numerous cases in our 2015 book “Big Boys Big Egos and Strategic Intelligence”.

Top management doesn’t understand strategic intelligence

April 1, 2016

Joseph Rodenberg

A World View, Intelligence Briefings

For decades, it has been difficult to climb the intelligence pyramid from data, information, and knowledge to intelligence towards courses of action. A second point is that most of us tend to stick to the short-term operational and tactical level, because most managers are not aware of the strategic direction of the company. Peter Drucker stated that strategy is the most difficult thing in business because it means making choices that differentiate us from the competition. A third aspect is that data and information management in most organizations is generally poor!! Why is this?