Large Crowds, No Clouds, and Wise Words at Drucker Day

What is the key to company growth and success?

For management expert and author Renée Mauborgne, who delivered a keynote address as part of Drucker Day 2017, “The Drucker Path: Past, Present, and Future,” company performance in today’s shifting financial landscape requires a willingness to redefine limits and shift from competing with rivals (in a red ocean full of predators) to finding new markets (in a blue ocean without rivals).

“How can an ordinary organization with ordinary people shift?” she asked an audience of several hundred attendees gathered in Garrison Theater. “To do that, you have to acknowledge people’s fears and build their confidence to take that journey.”

Drucker Day guests received a signed copy of Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Shift at the start of a busy day of programming that included faculty and guest presentations as well as honoring Professor Emeritus Joseph Maciariello with the Peter Drucker Lifetime Achievement Award.

“Joe did it all so brilliantly,” said Professor Jean Lipman-Blumen, who, along with Drucker Dean Jenny Darroch, saluted Maciariello for his stewardship of the Drucker legacy and his expansion of it with his own scholarship and critical revisions of such quintessential Drucker texts as Management and Management Cases.

And there was a hologram, too.

For many alumni who never had a chance to meet Peter Drucker, the curtain raised on a special hologram treatment of Drucker based on one of his later interviews.

“How did my interest in management begin? By accident. I fell into it,” Drucker told the audience as he described his search for a new understanding of management.

The afternoon segment of the program closed with remarks by second keynoter, Deborah Clark, senior vice president of one of the most successful suites of weekly radio broadcasts in the country, Marketplace.

For more of the sights of this year’s Drucker Day, visit CGU’s Instagram account.

Below is a video of the Drucker hologram presentation, which was created by the university’s Director of Video Production Anthony Penta. Visit CGU’s YouTube channel.