Executive summary. Global organisations face systemic underperformance as outdated management models prove inadequate for today’s simultaneous shocks: geopolitical conflict, economic fragmentation, and AI disruption. The “Next Management” (TNM) framework offers an alternative—embracing complexity with humility, balancing AI capabilities with wisdom, and treating management itself as a subject for innovation. TNM provides practical guides for reflective, scenario-based leadership that moves beyond operational efficiency to institutional renewal. Business schools must champion this transformation by experimenting at the speed of change, integrating AI while preserving human judgment, and co-creating curricula with businesses and civic partners. Without this fundamental shift, organisations will remain fragile and disconnected from the societal needs they’re meant to serve.

Key takeaways

• The Next Management reframes Drucker’s legacy for an era defined by geopolitical tension, economic fragmentation, and AI disruption, urging leaders to move beyond command and control reflexes towards reflective, adaptive, and human-centred management.
• TNM is both conceptual and practical, offering guiding principles and reflective tools that help leaders navigate complexity, integrate AI responsibly, balance experimentation with operational excellence, and renew institutional legitimacy.
• Business schools are central to this renewal, called to rethink curricula, organisational models, and the societal purpose of management education in order to prepare leaders capable of shaping resilient institutions and contributing to broader collective action.

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With appreciation to Richard Straub & the Drucker Forum community for shaping the TNM journey

Peter Drucker established several foundational concepts that still anchor modern management thinking, although they need recontextualisation to rise to today’s challenges. He emphasised that management serves as the vital integrating force within society. Currently, both private and public sector organisations are exhibiting increasing signs of systemic underperformance, evident in widespread inefficiencies and bureaucratic hurdles. Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini, in their forthcoming edition of “Humanocracy,” highlight numerous disheartening examples, describing many organisations as “hidebound, repressive, and fainthearted.”

In early 2023, the Drucker Forum introduced the overarching theme ‘The Next Management (TNM)’ with a straightforward yet ambitious goal: to revitalise companies, institutions, and society, where a more relevant management approach is essential. Two years later, our call to action is more pressing than ever: it is crucial to challenge outdated managerial assumptions and practices that no longer align with our evolving world.

This essay reflects my personal viewpoints, shaped by decades of experience in academic leadership and innovation. It builds on the collaborative spirit of the Drucker Forum’s TNM initiative and draws on contributions from a diverse community of thinkers and doers.

Recent global developments have made the case for a new kind of management even more urgent. In March 2025, Zanny Minton Beddoes, Editor-in-Chief of The Economist, pointed to three profound and simultaneous shocks facing the global economy: geopolitical conflict, economic fragmentation, and transformative technology (particularly AI). These are not short-term disruptions, they are systemic shifts that render old economic and managerial models inadequate, across sectors.

Over the last few years, I have contributed to the public discourse about next leadership thinking management practices and it remains the key topic for the 2025 Drucker Forum: The Next Era of Leadership – All Hands on Deck. This essay strengthens the case for TNM given what we have learned since. I introduce three new perspectives and propose concrete next steps for leaders and institutions seeking to take TNM seriously.

The term ‘next’ serves as an analogy for practices better suited to current challenges, not a fixed destination or model. This distinction is crucial: TNM aspires to enable leaders in all types of institutions to engage in meaningful reflection before they make necessary changes, rather than conforming to standardised ‘best practice’ approaches.

1. Why TNM is Needed Now: From Theoretical Ideal to Global Necessity

In response to circumstances shaping the world here and now, too many institutions have reverted to command-and-control reflexes. Bureaucracy is back, powered by dashboards and AI tools that monitor, measure, and automate. However managing complexity by compression is not working in the long run. The result is fragility, distrust, and diminishing returns on talent and ultimately on overall performance.

TNM, in contrast, invites a different response: embrace complexity with humility, learn continuously, and treat management itself as a subject for innovation. AI technologies will augment skills and work, but in TNM we remain committed to balancing cutting-edge technology with the essential human interaction central to Peter Drucker’s philosophy.

Drucker recognised that management’s ultimate significance extends far beyond organisational performance to societal functioning and human flourishing. TNM is not a plea for utopian reinvention, but an emerging framework for renewing institutions from within as leaders adapt to changing global circumstances as well as finding ways to proactively increase the performance of their institutions. It acknowledges that navigating organisational polarities impacts broader societal systems.

2. From Principles to Practice: Making TNM Actionable

What makes TNM different is that it is both conceptual and pragmatic. It is not a template or set of context-free best practices. Rather, it offers simple guiding principles that managers can translate into practice that make sense to them and their organisations. Our approach addresses Drucker’s concern about “the governance of corporations” by offering reflective tools that help leaders consider the broader consequences of their management practices, potentially helping to restore institutional legitimacy within society.

To help leaders take the next step, I suggest a reflective, scenario-inspired approach anchored in key shifts in both thinking and subsequent practice. In view of the accelerating possibilities of AI, many leaders I have talked with struggle with what and how to innovate beyond increasing operational efficiency. Others have real concerns they will be outperformed by creative AI tools and hordes of coordinated AI agents.  The TNM framework invites reflection over how organisations cultivate experimentation while maintaining operational excellence, how they think of collaboration and partnership, how they integrate AI and for what purpose, how they trade-off between the short and longer term, what role intuition has in their world of data-based decisions, how they can be pragmatic in view of shifting ideological pressures, and what they do to continue to self-renew their organisations and leadership.

I also invite deeper reflections about potential decisions and actions. For example: if your organisation had to choose between maintaining predictable operations or experimenting with a high-risk innovation, how would the decision be made? If a critical challenge arose that could not be solved internally, how would your organisation engage with others? If a cluster of AI agents could replace certain roles, would your leadership team prioritise human augmentation of creativity or automate for cost reduction?

These questions are not tests. They are invitations to dialogue—within leadership teams, with staff, and across networks. They help identify where change is already happening, and where legacy assumptions are still in charge.

3. Listening at Scale: The Drucker Forum’s AI Voice Agent

In the run-up to the 2025 Drucker Forum, we are piloting a new tool to embody TNM in practice: an AI voice agent that interviews participants as they register. The goal is to listen at scale, capturing insights not only from speakers and experts, but from the wider community of practitioners, consultants, and researchers.

The voice agent does not deliver answers; it asks curated questions and follow-up questions based on the professional role of the interviewees and their views. It invites thoughtful people to reflect on how they think about management practices today and how to make them more fit for purpose in our world in the here and now. These recorded reflections will form the basis for community insights to be shared with participants and researchers.

This approach is not just an innovation in event design. It is an example of what TNM can look like: using intelligent tools not to control people, but to surface wisdom and examples – at scale. It signals a commitment to ongoing dialogue, collective learning, and openness – all core values of TNM.

4. What Comes Next: Shaping an Institutional Movement

TNM stands within a rich intellectual tradition that includes significant contributions from many perspectives, such as systems thinking and complexity approaches. However, we recognise that more illustrations from recent, real-world practice are needed. The Global Peter Drucker Forum community is now actively collecting examples that illustrate TNM in action, beyond legacy models or recycled best practices. Readers are encouraged to contribute: where do you see such principles being lived – whether in a business, a hospital, a university, or a startup? Where do you see analytical rigor and human judgment not as opposing forces resisting resolution, but rather navigated dynamically according to specific circumstances and cultural contexts?

What we do know is this: TNM is not an abstraction. It is an emerging pattern, visible in places where leaders choose adaptability over rigidity, collaboration over silos, and reflection over reaction.

Drucker’s later works, particularly Management Challenges for the 21st Century, anticipated many of today’s most pressing concerns. TNM offers an approach to create the future – not by reinventing everything, but by rethinking what management is for, and how it can better serve people, institutions, and society.

However, while institutional reform is essential, it will not be sufficient unless supported by wider collective action – by coalitions of companies, public organisations, educational institutions, and platforms willing to co-create new approaches and metrics for success.

5. Educating for The Next Management: A Call to Business Schools

If management is to evolve, so too must the institutions that educate managers. Business schools are facing the question: evolve or expire? In a time marked by geopolitical tension, economic fragmentation, and AI disruption, institutions must revisit what they teach, how they teach, and to what end. At two recent global conferences, I had the opportunity to explore these themes more directly – by challenging business school leaders, faculty, and professional staff to prepare graduates not just for opportunity, but for leadership in a world of coercion and conquest; and by debating whether the traditional business school model is being overtaken by faster, more agile learning platforms. These are not rhetorical exercises. They are live tests of what kind of education the future demands.

The TNM conversation presents an opportunity to ask different questions. Are business schools building the capacity to experiment at the speed of change? Are they redefining the professional identity and societal value of management? How do they integrate AI into learning while preserving human judgment and reflection? Are schools prepared to navigate a semi-globalised world with diverse managerial traditions? And what does it mean to be built to change, not just built to last?

Sixteen years ago, in my inaugural address as President of Copenhagen Business School, I advocated for the adoption of five guiding principles: relevance, distinctiveness, excellence, imagination, and collaboration. These principles are more pertinent today than ever. Relevance involves anchoring research and teaching in real-world challenges. Distinctiveness emerges from forging unique institutional identities rather than chasing rankings. Excellence demands honesty about where a school can truly excel. Imagination unlocks innovative ways to engage learners and bridge theory with practice. Collaboration – embodied in the spirit of ‘join us’- transforms the school into a purpose-driven community.

Since then, I have continued to champion and drive change in business education—in Sweden, as CEO and Dean of Jönköping International Business School; globally, in different leadership roles at Hult; and most recently as Executive Director of the Drucker Forum affiliated think tank Vienna Center and lead architect to TNM initiative. Each role has reinforced my conviction that business schools can serve as dynamic and bold laboratories for experimentation and catalysts for broader societal renewal—all while achieving and maintaining multi-accreditation.

Several pioneering private and public institutions are already exploring approaches consistent with TNM, such as AI-augmented learning journeys, interdisciplinary project studios, and co-created curricula with businesses and civic partners. The aim is not to replace business education but to revitalise it – aligning with the needs of society and the next generation of managers, who must navigate more than the three simultaneous challenges we face today. Just like Drucker emphasised, balancing change and continuity.

I invite business schools to actively participate in this renewal. TNM is more than a philosophy for business; it is a call to redefine how we learn to lead.

The journey is open. Join us.