Every November the Global Peter Drucker Forum gathers in Vienna to argue about the future of management, in the name of a man who spent his life insisting management is a liberal art and not a control system. The recurring theme is easy to caricature as high-minded talk. The data underneath it is not abstract at all.
The managers are the ones checking out
Start with the measurement that should worry any executive. Gallup's 2025 workplace study found global employee engagement at just 20 percent, and, more tellingly, manager engagement down 9 points since 2022, falling from 27 to 22 percent between 2024 and 2025 alone (Gallup, 2025). The layer meant to carry the culture is disengaging faster than the people it manages. That is not a workforce motivation problem. It is a signal that the job itself has become unlivable.
Deloitte's 2025 Human Capital Trends, drawing on nearly 10,000 leaders across 93 countries, shows the mechanism. Managers spend close to 40 percent of their time firefighting and on administrative work, and only about 13 percent developing their people, while 36 percent feel unprepared for the human part of the role (Deloitte, 2025). The developmental core that justified the position has been crowded out by administrative debris. This is precisely the degradation of management-as-craft that a Drucker-inspired conference exists to confront.
Complexity is outrunning the model
The structural picture is no kinder. McKinsey's State of Organizations survey of more than 2,500 leaders found two-thirds describing their organizations as overly complex and inefficient, and only half feeling prepared to react to external shocks (McKinsey, 2023). Layers and process accumulate faster than value. When the forum debates whether the twentieth-century corporation is fit for the twenty-first, this is the exhibit.
The alternative is a redesign, and it has receipts
The useful half of the conversation is not lament but the existence of working alternatives. Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini (2018) documented Haier's reorganization into roughly 4,000 self-managing microenterprises coordinated by internal contracts rather than managers, alongside gross profit and revenue growth of about 23 and 18 percent a year over the prior decade. The point is not that every firm should copy Haier. It is that the managerial hierarchy is a choice, not a law of nature, and that at least one industrial giant replaced it with something measurably productive.
That reframes what a forum like this is really debating. The question is not whether managers should try harder inside the current design. It is whether the design should change so that the human work of management, developing people, exercising judgment, distributing authority, stops being squeezed out by administrative overhead.
The practical read
The Drucker Forum's recurring anxiety is grounded in numbers a company can check against its own. Manager engagement is collapsing (Gallup, 2025), the role has been hollowed out into firefighting (Deloitte, 2025), and organizations are drowning in their own complexity (McKinsey, 2023), while at least one alternative shows the layer can be replaced by designed coordination without losing performance (Hamel and Zanini, 2018). The takeaway is not to send managers to another resilience workshop. It is to redesign the job and the structure around it, so that management becomes again what Drucker insisted it was: the work of making people productive, not the work of processing approvals.
Sources
- Gallup (2025). State of the Global Workplace 2025. Global engagement is 20 percent and manager engagement fell 9 points since 2022. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/659610/state-global-workplace.aspx
- Deloitte (2025). 2025 Global Human Capital Trends. Managers spend about 40 percent of time firefighting and 13 percent developing people, with many unprepared. https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/topics/talent/human-capital-trends/2025.html
- McKinsey (2023). The State of Organizations 2023. Two-thirds of 2,500-plus leaders call their organizations overly complex and inefficient. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/the-state-of-organizations-2023
- Hamel and Zanini (2018). The End of Bureaucracy. Haier replaced managers with about 4,000 self-managing microenterprises alongside strong growth. https://hbr.org/2018/11/the-end-of-bureaucracy