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Closing The Responsibility Gap

What is the Responsibility Gap?

Consider: One in 10 people across the globe had to pay a bribe last year. In the U.S., more than 2 million homes have been or soon will be foreclosed upon. Meanwhile, each day, 24,000 people worldwide die from hunger or related causes—even though we have enough food to feed them.

“Our problem,” Nobel Peace Prize Winner Muhammad Yunus has concluded, “is one of management, not lack of resources.” Clearly, a great distance has opened up between our obligations—to be effective managers and ethical leaders—and our actions. We call this the Responsibility Gap.

The Drucker Institute offers a 45-minute presentation on the Responsibility Gap that covers the vital importance of management to the health of modern society; the dire implications of our collective failure to be effective managers and ethical leaders of our people, resources, and institutions; and how Peter Drucker’s core insights and values highlight a way to begin bridging the Gap. A documentary version is in development.

To find out more about The Responsibility Gap show and how you can bring one of our trained presenters to an event, email contact@druckerinstitute.com.

Learn more from a few of the many organizations that track different dimensions of the Responsibility Gap. MORE

How can we close the Gap?

Thousands of people from organizations large and small, corporate and nonprofit, and all around the world have used these seven questions from the Drucker Institute to get going. MORE

You can join with others who are already helping organizations in your community become more ethical and effective. MORE

You can get inspired by the growing number of organizations using ethical leadership and effective management to tackle some of society’s biggest challenges. MORE

S.C. Johnson’s Greenlist process evaluates the impact of thousands of raw materials on human and environmental health. Using Greenlist, S.C. Johnson eliminated almost 6 million pounds of toxic chemicals from its Windex and Saran Wrap products. The company now licenses Greenlist royalty-free to other firms that want to use it.
Tesco’s wind-powered stores, high-tech recycling, and biodiesel delivery trucks helped it cut the average energy use in its British buildings in half in just one year. Tesco bases senior-management bonuses partly on meeting energy- and waste-reduction targets.
Using low fixed prices, materials on credit, pre-costed housing designs, and supervised construction services, CEMEX developed its “Patrimonio Hoy” program to make housing affordable and possible for 70,000 of the poor in Mexico.
Grameen Bank has reversed conventional banking practice by removing the need for collateral and creating a banking system based on mutual trust, accountability, participation and creativity. It provides credit to the poorest of the poor in rural Bangladesh, has lifted hundreds of thousands of people there out of poverty, and consistently earns a profit.
IBM created in 2004 the World Community Grid, which harnesses the unused computing power of individual and business computers around the world to help unlock genetic codes that underlie diseases like AIDS and Alzheimer’s.
TOMS shoes are the harbinger of what has been christened as the ‘one to one movement’—for every shoe a customer buys, TOMS donates a pair to a child in need.
Dr. Govindappa Venkataswamy and David Green use what Green terms “compassionate capitalism” to give sight and hearing back to millions of people who would otherwise be blind and deaf.
Nick Moon and Martin Fisher founded ApproTEC to provide poor people tools that help them work more productively, allowing them to break the cycle of poverty.
Teach for America is a national teacher corps of recent college graduates who commit two years to teach and to effect change in under-resourced urban and rural public schools.
CityYear’s national network of youth corps helps young people develop leadership skills while performing community service.
Grassroot Soccer uses the world’s most popular sport to educate kids in sub-Saharan Africa about HIV and its prevention.