"Be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. (...) Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer." These words by Rainer Maria Rilke have been among my favourites for a while.
At the beginning of June, we tried to live the question "What is performance that really matters?" at this year's Global Peter Drucker Forum Summer Forum - exploring the conviction of Peter Drucker that the main job of a manager is to increase the performance of an organisation whilst considering that our idea of performance might have changed, specifically after two years of the pandemic.
For instance, as Tamara J. (Tammy) Erickson suggested, "we should schedule time to get to know each other" in our teams and organisations. Human contact, the connection to the people we work with, is not a nice-to-have anymore. How we feel in our team is crucial if we want honest and fruitful collaboration. Only when we feel comfortable among each other can we start digging deeper into the questions that matter: What could I change to be more authentic as a leader? How can we inspire creativity in each other? Which conversations are we not having?
These were only three questions that Klaiton collected in a big co-creation process with the Drucker community at the beginning of the year - and where we could now present the beautiful outcome in the form of a virtual booklet: 100 questions for performance that matters.
Amongst all these questions, there was for sure at least one answer that I lived into during this extensive ten-hour marathon. The collaboration among the Drucker team members is what helps me not only keep up the performance but thoroughly enjoy the ride. Thanks once more Richard Straub, Eduardo P. Braun, Franziska Graf, Raupp Julia, Elena Stelzig, Christine Jama, Ashraf ABUSHADY, Mohammad Hosseini, Margot Tschank, Astrid Groborsch & the entire GPDF team!