The Future of Management by Gary Hamel

The Future of Management by Gary Hamel

On Christmas Eve, 1968, the Apollo 8 command module became the first human made object to orbit the moon. During its journey back to earth, a ground controller's son asked his dad, “Who's flying the spacecraft?” When the question was relayed up to the homebound crew, astronaut Bill Anders replied, “I think Sir Isaac Newton is doing most of the driving now.” [1]

Like that curious lad, I'd like to pose a question: Who's managing your company? You might be tempted to answer, “The CEO,” or “the executive team,” or “all of us in middle management.” And you'd be right, but that wouldn't be the whole truth. To a large extent, your company is being managed right now by a small coterie of long departed theorists and practitioners who invented the rules and conventions of “modern” management back in the early years of the 20th century. They are the poltergeists who inhabit the musty machinery of management. It is their edicts, echoing across the decades that invisibly shape the way your company allocates resources, sets budgets, distributes power, rewards people, and makes decisions. So pervasive is the influence of these patriarchs that the technology of management varies only slightly from firm to firm. Most companies have a roughly similar management hierarchy (a cascade of EVPs, SVPs, and VPs). They have analogous control systems, HR practices and planning rituals, and rely on comparable reporting structures and review systems. That's why it's so easy for a CEO to jump from one company to another—the levers and dials of management are more or less the same in every corporate cockpit. [2]

The varied nature of these required qualities makes developing manager/leaders for the future, encompassing all the above qualities, a challenge for education providers. Kacena argued that "At a time when leadership is more crucial than ever to our very survival, there is a severe shortage of people to lead corporations into the next century", [3] and this can be attributed to the lack of any form of systematic leadership development. That leadership development that is available is very closely associated with the requirements of particular organisations and neglects some of the key attributes needed by future leaders--those of problem solving problem solving, initiative and creative thinking.

Yet unlike the laws of physics, the laws of management are neither foreordained nor eternal—and a good thing, too, for the equipment of management is now groaning under the strain of a load it was never meant to carry. Whiplash change, fleeting advantages, technological disruptions, seditious competitors, fractured markets, omnipotent customers, rebellious shareholders—these 21st century challenges are testing the design limits of organizations around the world, and are exposing the limitations of a management model that has failed to keep pace with the times.

Think about the great product breakthroughs over the last decade or two that have changed the way we live: the personal computer, the mobile phone, digital music, e-mail, the ...