Is business a °living machine?

For over 50 years, almost F every practitioner of business management has probably been a fan of Peter Drucker.

- R GOPALAKRISHNAN

I am, therefore, like a hha/ct in a temple town as I visit his birthplace, Vienna, to participate in the "Davos of Management". The Global Peter Drucker Forum and the Living Machine Institute in Austria have joined forces to reframe "The Next Management", titled "The India way: Humanism, Longevity, and Compounding Returns". In recent times, more people have been struck that the capitalist-enterprise model, seeded in America, is perhaps broken. What is the model? Why is it thought to be broken? The centrepiece ofthis model is the joint-stock company, in which the liability of the shareholder is limited. Over the past decades, the single-minded focus of management leaders has increasingly been to promote shareholder wealth on the premise that the shareholders are the owners of the company. Are they really? The people who aspire, dream, sweat, yearn, and love are usually not the shareholders bu I the people who are most affected by the company - community society, employees, vendors, foi example. The current model has evolved over a couple of centuries concurrently with the industrial revolution. Wher; there is a sharp focus on shareholders, there emerges a strong emphasis on efficiency - o] manpower, machines, and capital usage - rather than on effectiveness. What is the difference?