Graziadio Business Report Blog

Linnea Bernard McCord, JD, MBA

Peter Drucker, the famous management consultant, who is credited with creating the professional field of management, died a few years ago at age 95. He was the quintessential non-emotional thinker—a voracious reader who observed dispassionately what was going on around him without bias or preconception. He invented the word “knowledge worker” decades before it became a reality.

When asked how he could “see the future,” Drucker is reported to have said that he didn’t see the future; he simply saw what already existed today that others could not and would not see.

While attending university in Germany, Peter Drucker worked as a journalist. Adolf Hitler had already clearly outlined his vision of the world he wanted to create in his book, Mein Kampf, and Drucker had read every word.

As soon as Hitler took office as Chancellor of Germany in 1933, Drucker left Germany because he “saw the future.”

Instead of wishing and hoping that Hitler would not be as bad as his book indicated he would be, Drucker dispassionately evaluated the situation as it was. By acting unemotionally on the facts at hand, not what he hoped the facts would be, Drucker escaped the fate of 12 million people who later died in German concentration camps.

Continue reading ‘What You Need to Know About the Future’

This is a guest post by Linnea B. McCord, JD, MBA, Associate Professor of Business Law

We are only just beginning to comprehend how bad an ethics mess we’re in—but it’s likely to be a real doozy.

Failing CEOs walk away with more than $100 million and Wall Street investment bankers pay themselves many billions of dollars in bonuses even as investors’ returns plummet. State and federal politicians with little or no money when they enter public life are worth tens of millions of dollars just a few short years after leaving office. All of this is against the backdrop of the worst housing downturn since the Great Depression, a massive credit crunch that threatens to wreak havoc on our financial system, mounting layoffs, the possibility of millions losing their homes, rapidly declining state budgets, crushing personal, corporate and federal debt and jihadist Islamic groups that wish to destroy us.

While our first inclination may be to blame “them” for all of our current ethics fiascoes—and there are plenty of “thems” to choose from these days—as a free nation and a free people, we bear the ultimate responsibility for allowing ourselves to get into this ethics mess.

How did we do this you might ask?

The answer is simple—by allowing ourselves to become so ethically confused over the past forty years.

Continue reading ‘Our Ethics Mess’