“As Caulkin notes in the Financial Times, “the invisible link between sluggish innovation, cost-cutting, share buybacks, the jobs and pay squeeze, and neo-Taylorism, is management incentives. What locks them all together in a tight, self-reinforcing paradigm is shareholder value–the assertion that the sole purpose of the company is to maximize returns to shareholders.” If this is correct, the principal question for the Drucker Forum is whether we will be able to agree on severing this invisible link. Will the Forum accept that this is the critical link that needs to be broken?”

Excerpted from Steve Denning:

“In the context of the emerging movements to reform the management of big corporations today, … thought leaders allude to the possibility of a Reformation in management, and indeed of the entire system of capitalism in which managers operate. Thus in June 2014, Clayton Christensen and Derek van Bever wrote in the June 2014 issue of Harvard Business Review (HBR). “The orthodoxies governing finance are so entrenched that we almost need a modern-day Martin Luther to articulate the need for change.”

Christensen and van Bever are not alone in calling for some kind of Reformation. At the conclusion of this article, I list a number of the articles that have appeared over the past few months in leading pro-business journals such as Harvard Business Review, The Economist, Financial Times, The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and Forbes.com, all denouncing key management practices and calling for major change. So are we reaching a turning point in management, and indeed in capitalism as a whole, analogous to the religious Reformation five centuries ago?

Many of the world’s thought leaders will converge on Vienna Austria on November 13-14, 2014 to discuss this very question at the Global Peter Drucker Forum 2014. The speakers include Clayton Christensen, Gary Hamel and Roger Martin, among many others. “We have arrived at a turning point,” says the Forum’s abstract. “Either the world will embark on a route towards long-term growth and prosperity, or we will manage our way to economic decline.”

The question is whether the Drucker Forum in November will be able to reach agreement on the way forward and generate an united front for reform, or whether it will, as at the Colloquy of Marburg in 1529, splinter into different factions, as thought leaders emphasize their own particular slant on the issues, with the obvious common ground among them being lost in the din of heated debate on tiny doctrinal issues.

Why the current calls for reform are significant

A number of aspects are significant for assessing the current calls for reform.

First, these calls don’t come from a bunch of protesters camping in a park. They come from the most distinguished pro-business voices in the world—the heavy artillery of capitalism itself.

Second, it isn’t just one or two voices. The critiques and the calls for change are many and simultaneous. Big-gun broadsides are coming all at once.

Third, these thought leaders are not speaking in euphemisms or hedging their bets. These are flat-out denunciations of, not just one firm, but the whole management culture that prevails in big business. Phrases like “stock price manipulation” (HBR), “corporate cocaine” (The Economist) and “zombie managers in the grip of management ideas that refuse to die” (Financial Times) are typical.

Fourth, we now see incumbent members of the C-suite speaking out, such as Tim Cook at Apple [AAPL], Paul Polman at Unilever [UN], Xavier Huillard at the Vinci Group and John Mackey at Whole Foods [WFM]. These corporate leaders are speaking out while they are still in office, as compared to Jack Welch, who called shareholder primacy “the dumbest idea in the world,” long after he had retired. An even larger number of corporate leaders at firms like Gore, Google [GOOG], Amazon [AMZN], Linux, and Morning Star and many small organizations are actually practicing a more creative brand of management, even if they don’t always go around making speeches about capitalism.

Fifth, although there are different terms in use and different emphases, the common ground among the voices for change is more striking than the differences.

Finally, these thought leaders make a powerful case that the economic and social costs of current management practices are so grievous that in any event they are not sustainable. As Roger Martin argues in his article in the October issue of HBR on “The Rise and (Likely) Fall of the Talent Economy,” change will happen, one way or another. The only question is whether the transition is going to be quick and intelligent and elegant, or slow and ugly and even violent—like the religious Reformation— and take more than a century.”