A predominant feature of most organizations today is the top-down approach. Strategy is formulated at the top and is expected to be executed at lower levels of the pyramid. The underlying assumption is that wisdom, new ideas and a roadmap for the future are all the exclusive domain of the C-Suite.

Twenty years from now, I see the emergence of the inverted pyramid. Major decisions would be made at the operational level and driven up for ratification to the top. Such inclusiveness is inevitable given the ubiquitous nature of knowledge, the fact that radically new ideas can emanate from anywhere, and an adaptive roadmap is more likely to be generated by those who have a direct interface with key stakeholders - customers and suppliers. The assumption here is that with wealth being distributed more and more, the bottom of the present pyramid may have as much of a financial stake in the organization as the top.

All other constructs - the web structure, the CEO being the first among equals, empowerment, transparency, accountability et al follow from the inverted pyramid.

A predominant feature of most organizations today is the top-down approach. Strategy is formulated at the top and is expected to be executed at lower levels of the pyramid. The underlying assumption is that wisdom, new ideas and a roadmap for the future are all the exclusive domain of the C-Suite.

Twenty years from now, I see the emergence of the inverted pyramid. Major decisions would be made at the operational level and driven up for ratification to the top. Such inclusiveness is inevitable given the ubiquitous nature of knowledge, the fact that radically new ideas can emanate from anywhere, and an adaptive roadmap is more likely to be generated by those who have a direct interface with key stakeholders - customers and suppliers. The assumption here is that with wealth being distributed more and more, the bottom of the present pyramid may have as much of a financial stake in the organization as the top.

All other constructs - the web structure, the CEO being the first among equals, empowerment, transparency, accountability et al follow from the inverted pyramid.

The concept of managing an organisation based on operational efficiency will seem laughingly absurd in the next 20 years. The future is portfolio management. Organisations will base themselves around delivery channels within a single portfolio structure controlling projects and programs that create value for the customer and add value to the organisation. People will work in project related teams which provides the required dynamic structure to cope with an increased pace of unique service delivery.

In the future, organizations should make serious efforts to unearth uniqueness of each employee. This can't be done if the organization thinks only a few individuals are important. Discovering this uniqueness in others is not going to be an easy job as it will demand great patience and objectivity on the part of the managers. This will surely make the workplace dynamic and rich. The alternative to this kind of learning is dullness about which nothing needs to be said, as most of us engulfed by it.

To understand management in the future, you need to understand the generation that will comprise management. The youngest groups are all inclusive and team oriented. Therefore, decision making will also reflect that. The youngest groups are also a bit lax in fact checking and validation of information...all this being said, I think there will be great fireworks and great explosions. The explosions will be viewed as "oh well, we tried." This is differnet from the great desire of current generations to kill those who make mistakes, or hang a reasonable facsimile of the grand perpetrator. There is a chance for real innovation in a creative environment, which the newer generations require. There will also be more "free agency" in management, as the newer generations don't feel the same desire to build "this" company, just "a" company. That will refuel the the creative batteries but will also cause greater spikes and dips in corporate functioning.
Clearly, we need to see how the "Y's" raise their children, to know what will potentially happen in the last 10 of the next 20 years.

The function of "management" itself in the context of command and control. The leadership will be in managing the vision, use of resources, collaboration, and continual alignment to implement strategies to reach goals and achieve results.

The systematic approach of operations & detailed daily case study will be given most important with uniformal flow of information through out the organisation.---Vertically & Horizontally.

The most anachronistic feature will be a company that is committed to a national workforce or a company that has people work for hedquarters and jet around the world to different countries. The workforce will be recruited from all over the word and work together in multi-disciplinary teams mainly via inexpensive forms of communication. Due to an increasing environmental responsibility people will travel less and will work locally in small task forces.

To my mind, one thing in the modern organizational structure and principle that comes in the way of its efficiency is the time it takes to make a decision and implement it. As competition and customer demand increase in the next two decades, the organizations that address this aspect would survive longer.To achieve this the future organizations will have two halves, top and bottom. The bottom half will not have any hierarchy, will not be rigid and will have group of employees who take decisons and implement them on their own.The responsbility of the top half will be to ensure that talent infusion is maintained in the bottom half and anlyse the decisions which have been taken to make macro changes in the product and business strategies. There will also be constant swapping of individuals between the two halve, more often than the speed of organizational changes we are all used today.

I'm confident that the "language of strategy" will be simplified so that multiple stakeholders (from within and outside organisations) can actually understand each other. If 100s if not 1000s of stakeholders from the "top to the bottom" of organisations are going to share ideas and collaboratively evolve strategies (as so many believe), we'll need to replace the plethora of "objectives, goals, outputs, outcomes, targets, visions, missions, milestones, themes, strands, structures, frameworks, tasks, projects, action plans, mind maps, strategy, tactics, direction, purpose..." with a shared simple and effective taxonomy and syntax of language. We propose just 4 linked concepts: PROJECTS, which are run by organisations to produce RESULTS, leading to USES (by stakeholders in the "community") which in turn create BENEFITS. In our experience in the UK and New Zealand public and private sectors including with major international corporations, we haven't yet found anything strategic that can't be effectively accommodated by just these four inter-linked terms. It works, particularly for large numbers of stakeholders - see for example: http://www.wlga.gov.uk/uploads/publications/3285.pdf

Above are so many fantastic points. We have four generations that share the work force today. Servant Leadership inverts the old pyramid and allows for comfort for all generations.

N. Gordon
recruitnik.net

Although I wish there is a move to decentralized leadership, increased employee participation in organizational decisions, I don't think there will be a radical shift to this.

However, here are some things that I see will happen:
1. Organizations valuing and signing up for social responsibilities higher or as high as the typical shareholder responsibilities
2. Elimination of a series of internal management roles, such as: project, people, process managers to: concept, knowledge, innovation, experience managers - and each having virtual teams of passionate individuals signing up for that area, rather than someone really measuring and worrying about individuals or processes of projects
3. Complete disregard for location an employee works from. While there is enough buzz about flat worlds, globalization, 'working from home on work', 'work from work on home related stuff', etc. with incredible advances in multi-modal communications, the desire to be aware of, to be wary of, or to be concerned about geo-location of projects/people/processes will vanish

Sadly, I think we will see a continuation of what has become current practise over the last 20 years;
-The tenure of CEO's will remain very short & focus will be on cost cuts
- The CEO leaves after 2 years, with results looking good
- The new CEO comes in to find the place devoid of talent & organisational memory. Profitability slumps. After 2 years this CEO is considered a failure & leaves.
- A new CEO joins & starts to build up the team again and profitability slowly returns
- The whole cycle then starts again.

Perhaps the only real change will be that the Baby Boomers will be retiring.

i think that the future of the "businesskind" is to be like Da Vinci...universalkind, not only "businessknowing". The business are made from peoples and for peoples, thats why we need to know how are they..and how will. That's the kind of wisdom that the new Businesskind must have...MUBA (master of universal business administrations)

I have listened carefully to Professor Hamel's interview on BBC4 and have noted some interesting points which stimulate thinking about the future of management. I agree with Prof. Hamel that the hey days of hierarchies are over and much room should be made for creativity. However, the search for creativity poses a challenge of exploring the minds of customers and extract from them what needs they would wish to have satisfied. Successful business is about being able to create and offer more valuable solutions to various customers needs!

From a public service perspective much of what has already been written has direct application in this world.

In government strategic planning seems to be more about resource allocation than about establishing goals or outcomes (that benefit the public) etc. and build my empire.

Government organizations tend to be based on command and control and centralized control. So too will the leaders of the public service need to move away from this linear mechanistic approach and recognize organizations as complex adaptive systems. (Although it can be argued by some that the current move to "over" accountability is a reaction to lack of control when perhaps it is more lack of ethics and integrity similar to the private sector world.)

A systems approach to the development of public policy will replace the existing (focus on spinning the story for the political master) more to looking at the situation or problem through the "wicked problem" lens i.e. look at all options and understand that no matter what you do (probe in the words of Snowden) it may or may not work, leverage if it does, abandon if it does not--but alway remember the problem has changed because you did something.

The ability to embrace ambiguity and "manage" in that world will now be the key where there is no one magic answer or solution.

The public is smarter than we public servants give them credit for (we perhaps deceive ourselves see Trivers). They are demanding participatory government and we continue to lock ourselves in the central head office board room and think we know what is best.

The world is no longer orderly (if it ever was) and we need to embrace disorder and ambiguity and learn that new leadership approaches are needed.

The concept of an almighty and all knowing "boss" will tend to dissapear in favor of collaborated efforts. Job titles/status will have no defined boundaries, it will be a more "let's arrive at some conclusion" line of thinking.

Twenty years from now, management will be a circular motion. The top to bottom concept will be eliminated. Employees will operate as teams and the decisions will be made through consensus building. There will be no formal leaders but informal leaders that will emerge to address the situation. Once the situation is address the informal leader will return to the team where activity will evolve until another situation arises which may produce a different informal leader. Team members will be committed to the good of the team and organization but there will be high attrition. New replacements will continue the commitment to the team concept. In essence, twenty years from now, evolutionary management will drive the production and the success of the organization.

I think the primary driver in all of this is information and how it is disseminated. Information leads, ultimately, to power. Before the wide-spread distribution of information via the Internet, there needed to be a "command and control" hierarchy to foster information and ultimately execution through the enterprise. It was a structure that needed to be established to facilitate effective movement of information and measurement of execution. This fostered "information hording" in some cases that led to certain managers amassing relatively more "power" or position. In the future, controlling information, validating it, and aligning it in the correct way within an organization will be a primary goal. Hording will become almost impossible due to the speed and availability of information.

I would like to say that the hierachical structure will be "vaporized" however until we acknowledge the value of the front line leaders and until we give the front line leaders the skills they need to achieve and be accountable for the clinical, satisfaction and financial outcomes it will be a lost vision.

We have wonderful clinicans and staff who are promoted into the challenges of management positions and have never been given the skills based training to face their new jobs. They are ready, eager and certainly capable but have never been taught the skills.

Visions get smashed when lack of skills cause burnout.

Health care is a strong as these front line leaders.
I say this after 32 years of executive health care experience.

Health Care goals are achieved, and CEO's are as strong as their teams on the front line. Outcomes are directly linked to front line leadership's competency.

20 years into the future, an anachronistic practice will include the way in which variables to establish the pricing of our products and services were costed. Pricing of the past and present has for long not taken into consideration the environmental and social ramifications of our products and services. The regulations of tomorrow aswell as demand held by consumers and society will cause a rethinking of the way we price enviromentally adverse (or friendly for that matter) goods.

The hierarchy is doomed. Talent within hierarchies will either leave frustrated, wither or be groomed into teams of like minded individuals who care less for titles, status and money and more for the buzz of creation, innovation, success and recognition. Team dynamics will ensure tenure and retention. The key for CEO's and boards is to align team leaders and members with their own culture and vision.

I think Ramalingua Raju, founder of Satyam, has it just about right. In a recent McKinsey interview, he discussed the need to assemble and disassembled work force teams on the fly while offering the client a common experience from their perspective. It requires clarity of thinking and clear charges for people to understand their roles and when and when not to assume ownership of either the client or the task. Raju's says his concept mirrors fractals (similar but not necessarily the same buiding blocks of something larger) of science and math fame in the sense that workforce teams can be hurriedly configured in a lego fashion depending on the task.

We can assume that books like this one and the earlier book "Mobilizing Minds," will become the new genre in management books. It still remains to be seen if they are little more than the lastest management fad that will go the way of earlier fads as firms look to hasten their departure from the routine ways of organization in anticipation of increased environmental dynamism.

Whatever change is in place in 20 years, making current management principles look antiquated, will have to do with how we use technology in an organization. There will always be a pecking order, however subtly applied, in spite of team decision making and flattening chains of command. But how technology is managed for the good of the organization will be far more integrated and far less dependent on IT specialists, enhancing an employee's ability to participate and contribute to the company.

Suffocating Command and Control systems must go!
Management at all levels will migrate to practices that more fully empower people to think creatively, take reasonable risks, and be responsible for their actions. To do this, management must itself be creative in developing appropriate guidelines or boundaries that free-up people do be truly empowered. Within these boundaries, people will push organizations to achieve results that top-management alone is not capable of conceptualizing and implementing.

The most anachronistic feature will be the use of money to motivate people. We will see in the future that people will tend to ask for greater flexibility, more opportunity for working around the world, more time for any spiritual journey.

I believe that industrial organizations will continue to grow in their respect for the individual person as part of the process and that transformational leadership as described by Kouzes & Posner (2002) will grow. They noted that “leaders must demonstrate belief in their people and support learning environments that are predicated on openness and trust.” Today, many industrial organizations continue to draw upon the traditional transactional leadership approach heavily focused on short-term, day-to-day operational end results (Kanungo, 2001). While exacerbated by shareholders' demands for immediate results in publicly-traded companies, they often incorporate hegemonic and authoritarian aspects thereby stifling innovation.

With corporate social responsibility increasing as a cultural - and business - issue, along with the change in mindset of baby boomers from self-interested to legacy-focused, longer-term human-capital outlooks will strengthen. To ensure the sustainability of an organization, the leader - and leadership team - will focus on collaboration, coaching, facilitation and participation in harnessing the energy of their people while guiding their organizations toward overall improvements.

Managers will become redundant as technology will replace most of the workforce, which will be smaller in size but highly skilled and specialized leaving no one or few to be managed. The physical or conceptual barriers of the time and place will grow weaker, as the employees would be working at a time and place of their choosing. Employees will be expected to work as both managers and leaders, as they seek to evolve a new organizational structure!

Future management will be modelled around the C4I (Command, Control, Communication, Computers and Intelligence). Business intelligence will be outsourced and the C's will be integral. Command and Control will be defined at each level with more emphasis on maximum delegation. Communictions and Computers will evolve as custodians of organisational functions through effective MIS.

Life is a cycle, and hence after 20 years, we may go back to the ways man did business in the beginning. That means, they worked in their homes, creating products and then bring it to market for trading. We may go back such environment since we have tools available to create products at home, and to provide service to customers, from home (this is more than a virutal team). As this world proceeds towards more knowledgeable society, each individual wants space to prove his creativity and capability which may not be entirely possible in current work setup. Also managing individual aspirations will be very difficult if the current working set up exists after 20 years. Things like Work life balance, emotional intelligence, empathy, Helath &longevity, human network, Trust, localisation etc will be at the center stage than operational excellence, shareholder value, geographic spread etc which are most sought after words today.

The workplace will be "virtual" and the effective working hours will be 24/24, 7/7, with each employee being his/her own boss in the specific task that is under his/her responsibility.

Whether we like it or not we all build our organisations based on past experiences. Be it about the structure of the organisation, systems and procedures and man management etc.All the changes that are happening around us through out the in adequacies in the existing model of organisation. The major hope that will dominate the future will be a model which includes every one in the organisation like a wheel in the conveyer belt. Each and every wheel in the progress path will be independent and will have the leadership role individually.

The "exclusive management" will be antiquated in the future. The "inclusive management" will set in and create way for creativity and faster & exponential growth.

Future of management would mostly have to do with providing direction and measuring the progress in the set direction. Decision making, command and control would change and there would be sophisticated tools, benchmarks and control mechanism built into the work system.

The dependency on sophisticated tools and software will grow and these would start controlling the system. There would be no place for middle-managers. Top management and CEOs would be able to set and evaluate the results of the progress in the direction they would likely set even before taking the first step in the direction. They would do so with sophisticated models that would evolve in the business world. Dependency of the management on system will grow. Management of future instead of interacting with its resources might only be interacting with the system that controls its business.

If you're talking about North America and primarily the U.S. based corporate business management models taught in MBA schools, I believe the largest change will be demographical.

Virtually all of the "boomers" who value "paying your dues" and putting in your time regardless of position will be out of the workplace.

Job hopping Generation X who values skills over tenure developed the free flowing internet but hates management. They will be forced to hold the hands of almost 80 million Generation Y which will eventually take over...

Generation Y management is about community. It's almost communistic in that decisions are done by the group, activities are done together. They want to be valued as a member regardless of tenure and want to given responsibility to develop skills with a safety net.

Imagine the real time Facebook, MySpace and YouTube as models of future management: live, transparent, self-guided, opinionated, high tech, 24/7, open, high volume, creative, free flowing and more about individuality within the group powering decisions.

Management is moving down the pyramid by increasing the quantity of decision makers while reducing the quality of decisions.

Name one company run by a Generation Y that makes a profit???

That will be the successful management model in 20 years...

Work will be on even playing ground.

As the world becomes a much smaller place with wired and non wired technology, the onsite - offshore as a value added model would disappear. It would become irrelevant as most organizations become "virtual" using advanced collaborative tools. The need to term any one particular region as onsite or offshore will become obsolete. In twenty years the place of work might remain only track homebase of a person. This would create a level playing ground.

Just five years ago, the majority of us never heard of let alone used blogs, podcasts and wikis to distribute content and engage our associates. Project management tasks and associate involvement twenty years into the future, and we will have a totally wired society connected through a variety of "safe" work communities that not only provide expert content but are able to socialize integrated solutions throughout the workforce much more effectively than today.

The biggest change will be in the way that we work with customers. Even today with "solution selling" processes taking hold and billions spent on CRM systems, our salespeople, in general, sell the same way that they did 20 years ago. Certainly improvements, but hardly signficant changes since the facts clearly show that sales cycles have increased not decreased, and the needle measuring salesforce effectivity metrics has barely moved in the past five years. The problem is that most companies are still managed by a sales-bred generation of managers who have not absorbed these new systems and tools into their own DNA. Intellectually, some of them understand the benefits, but they have not fully embraced the revolution that has taken place about selling and marketing from the customer's side of the table.

Twenty years from now, we believe that there will be a new generation of salespeople running our companies, and at that time, we will finally be able to realize the full impact of on our company's growth by working directly with customers rather then selling to them.

Human behavior has not changed drastically and that is where we as leaders spend a great deal of our time. Management in the future will have to contend with that fact. Highly successful managers will design structures that brings out the best in the workforce they have which in some cases may be the pyramid or a self-coordinating network. The purposes that organizational structures serve are not likely to change (establish a pattern of communication, clarify roles, establish a culture and climate, determine a flow of work, etc.). As a result, all the patterns we see today will still be there and managers will be adjusting to fit their workforces.

Twenty years from now, or even earlier, the line between for-profit and non-profit will be blurred. Every "Product Team" will be competing for scarce talent: individuals that effect social change while earning a decent salary.

Twenty years down the line the following may be looked as antiquated in a modern industrial enterprise.

1. Long term relationship between Employer/Employee.
2. CEO working as driving force.
3. Government control over business
4. Centralised command & control.
5. Loyalty to Employer
6. REspect for the superior ( may be it will be replaced by mutual respect)
7. Stright jocket reporting systems.
8. Very high payouts to CEO/Presidents etc., without linking to performance of the company.
9. Retiring age at 60( or above or what ever it is)
10.Lay off /Labour retrenchment
11.Pension to employees.

Though reasons are not asked to post, I feel it is worth mentioning reasons to enable a reador to understand my view points.
TWenty years down the line, competition may go up forcing Corporations to look for cost cutting across the organisations which include pensions and CEO pay outs. The demand for skilled labour will go up making the organisations to retain instead of lay off. Contrary to this, with increased oppurtunities employees constantly look for betterment. With cross border movement of labour, money and material, government controls on Large modern enterprises will come down. With the high level awareness either thru education or otherwise - respect for superiors will be replaced with mutual respect i.e., it goes by dictum " Give respect and take respect". CEO role also may undergo a change from being a driving force to a Mentor's position.

regards
VENKAT P RAO

The essence of our new society and economic structure is the Digital Network (Internet). People within the network have been graced with the ability to communicate with anyone within this network, thereby flattening hierarchical structures and allowing spontaneous, quick, and targeted tactics in business, personal communications, and terrorism.

Large business organizations need to reconfigure themselves as small, decision-making units of business which can take advantage of the mission of the larger organization while simultaneously able to operate at the low level. In effect, what is considered "departmental" in a large organization will be distilled into its own small business with its own operating budget, profit making strategy, and suppliers. Managers will need to operate within this new framework with increased pressure to maintain direction, attend to emerging markets, and create profit while remaining flexible. Good luck old boys!

Those Small businesses already organized as lean operational entities are poised for success. Managers in the small business realm already operate as distinct suppliers, profit-makers, and, if successful, are spontaneous and flexible to take advantage of emerging business directions.

I think it is the era for small business and the era where large business needs to rethink itself.

Frustrating tenets of Past Organizations:
Bureaucracy,
Rigid and ineffective processes,
Employee talent and skill not properly tapped and developed
Being paid for attendance instead of paid for performance and results (8:00am - 4:30pm not longer cuts it!)
Organization not able to properly link their mission, to their strategic objectives, their key activities, and their budgets
Organizations incapable of anticipating and responding to changes in market trends
Owning your employees intellectual property
Being afraid of employee development because of the possibility of losing that employee

Obsolete will be the manager himself! With the exponential expansion of IT & communications, the growing knowledge base and multi skilling of the technician coupled with his tendency to creativity, all that will be required to maintain the status quo is co-ordination and co-operation. Money is dead long live the wealth measuring reference unit be it dollars, dung or dustbin lids!

Twenty years from now we will have changed our concept of "good" leadership from that which pursues only shareholder returns to one that embraces the full meaning of "good."

Such leaders will embrace goals that are judged as "good" by the societies within which they operate and, in most societies, that incudes the pursuit of profit; they will be "good" in an ethical sense, doing the right things in the right ways; they will be "good" in the sense that they are efffective leaders who can attract, engage, energize an enable others to their cause; and they will make people feel "good" so that they will remain attracted to the organization -- whether they be employees, customers or shareholders.

As much as I'd like to believe heirarachy will go the way of the dinosaurs, given that it's been around nearly as long (ok, as far back as the monastics), I would echo some previous comments:

* large in-house I/T will all be outsourced (you used to spend WHAT on I/T per year???).

* vertical integration resembling keiretsus will make permeable org boundaries more commonplace, enabling workers to move easily between member companies. The idea of staying with a company for one's entire career will be viewed much like 19th century child labor is viewed today.

* two weeks of paid vacation (I hope ;-) will seem equally antiquated and barbaric

* "going to the office" will have a certain gas lights, long dresses and parasols feeling to it.

My comment is a more to do with the direction management will be driven in the future based on the current organizational desire to train more frontline staff on management skills - especially from the fact that almost everyone (top to bottom) wants to get an MBA - soon an MBA will be a common skill rather than a top management skill.

That said, then what will this knowledge enhancement movement drive?

Well, organizations will be driven towards a self management matrix. Each front line staff will manage their own work/job requirements and then they would form and dissolve into management teams that would form teams based on the management decision to be made. The titled "Manager" would not be needed any more as team members would singularly or collectively have the management skills needed to make the decision/s.

This movement seems to be growing fast. A symptom of this is the fact that the composition of meetings today is slowly growing in representation of front line staff and meetings are more of an open discussion or brainstorming format than the earlier format that was manager driven. Another symptom is the urge of organizations to form performance improvement and operations review "huddle" teams that are on-the-line rather than off-line.

The contention that the boss is all knowing and he has to be listened at all costs will go. In emerging scenerio if one has to look for long term results there has be a trio, of multiskill,knowledge and risk taking capability. It can no longer rests with one person and it has to be from a team which has to be tolerant to take success and failure equally.

i think management needs to innovation in social fields.i imagine organizations have got any problems in future in wealth and poverty

The ‘future organization’ must be globally resourced, agile (built on speed to meet ever changing customer requirements with high quality competitive solutions…do say we can’t-say how fast and good), built on people intelligence from around the globe and be as virtual as possible…investment in the right people and tools to meet customer demands.

Too many companies continue to talk ‘global’, provide lip service to being ‘people orientated’ and hide behind ‘customer focused’ when in reality they are the old style of management running to the same old reports, management versus leadership and treat people as numbers not a the valued resource they each are.

The ‘new company’ will employ the belief in ‘creating’ an highly talented organization of people from around the globe focused on the core competencies required to differentiate in the market, be goal driven for both the short-term but equally so long-term, be innovative both in product but also services to exceed customer expectations (sustained growth versus only short-term numbers) and use ‘investment’ dollars in key areas and outsource all other functions.

Two essential pieces to this change are required: 1. Leadership that will actually drive this change and 2. Boards and Wall Street that understand short-term but more importantly the long term view of the company…..a bad quarter might be in the plan to meet a more viable longer-term strategy.

Changing management all the times at any level does not bode well for companies but rather having the right leadership that are ‘change agents’ is the call of the day!

What is the last word in Management? Actually there is no last word in Management.
The future of mangement is looking tremendious.

As we enter the wisdom age from the knowledge worker age, the leaders who operate from integrity, with honest principles will be more successful. Spiritual Quotient will become more important than EQ and IQ. Hence, a totally new skill set will be required by the managers.

The continuing globalisation in a borderless world will make virtual offices and virtual teams the dominant form of commercial operations. This trend will in turn speed up the birth of more pioneering collaborative technologies and competition in the telecom industry.

The anachronism will be the view of people (labour) as a factor of production. In this old view, people can be interchanged with capital goods to create efficiencies. This view underpins the entire intellectual structure of traditional business and economic thinking from microeconomics to project management.

The "new institutional economics" presaged the change, but today, nearly every management guru focuses on people as the key element of success. In 20 years, the central role of skilled, knowledgeable people in the success of business will be as fundamental to management thinking as evolution has become to the life sciences. The role of the boss as coach, rather than director, will also become the key learning from an MBA programme.

These changes are not being driven by kindness or corporate responsibility. These changes are fundamental to competitive survival, whether in the lush boardrooms of Wall Street or here in the cramped quarters of an African CEO.

The concepts that define the success of a company by way of revenue, share value, employee strength, geographical spread etc. may undergo a change. A company's success may be defined based on its strengths in innovation, customer retention and employee satisfaction.

As resources get evenly distributed, economic/commercial values take a back seat while human/environment values take a front seat.

Future will be more customer driving the organisation rather than People in the organisation. I foresee that customer will physically drive the organisation. Customers will become managers and show the way where the organisation should move. Yes there will be administrators in the form of CCO (Chief Customer Officer) who direct the activity.

The entire process of the organisation would be Online and there would be hardly any interaction between the customer & the company

In an evolving networked economy we will see dynamic organisation structures and networked enterprises. The hierarchical structure will be depending upon value generation and situational convenience.

Flexible forms of management, relentless utilisation of fixed capital, intensified performance of labour, strategic alliances, and inter-organisational linkages will come down to shortening time per operation and to speeding up turnover of resources.

The value-making potential of labour and organisations will be dependent on autonomy of well-informed labour who will make decisions in real time and traditional disciplinary management styles will not fit the system.

Vikas Misra

Mr Hamel poses a very interesting question.

For me this causes me to wonder - why do we have management in the first place?
Historically they were there in two forms
1. the enterpreneur/owner
2. the organizer of multiple units of stable and fairly simple work

Since then the work context has become much more dynamic and far less simple. So managers invented projects and programs to handle organizing work that they could not handle themselves.
Some comments reflect a general movement to a more project-like workstile. This would replace managers with other managers - who have skills in more complex and/or more dynamic environments.

Since the 1950s top management has made a big fuss about their extremely important role in formulating strategy and ensuring it got executed. There are probably managers who actually can do that, if they can find the time ;-)
Given the first theme - managers organize sets of simple and stable work - they are most unsuited to formulate strategy, which is inherently very complex and very dynamic.
As globalization drives complexity and speed of development up, and will do so for the forseable future, the pressure on strategy formation will be increasing....

Another angle is that management is there to fulfill their quest for power and money. This typically has (almost) nothing to do with actually managing anything. Given that managers are humans (too) this is not likely to change. So if hierarchical management goes away - where can these poor people find their playground?

In my perception the most likely change boils down to a change in leadership. We will probably continue applauding the top managers, but actual leadership will become distributed as circumstances force decision making elsewhere in the organization in response to local, acute and/or highly complex situations.
We in the (old) west can either learn to play at internet / far-east speed or slumber before we get pensioned, leaving the next generations in an almost third-world economy.

I hope this contribution adds some 'why' to the mostly 'i wish' discussion!

Management in the Future

The future of management will be significantly altered over the next decade, due to outsourcing and redesign.

In the near future there will be a revolution in the way organizations manage their human capital. In doing so individuals will be empowered to enhance decision-making at the lowest levels, where competent and short-term decisions can be made.

Re-engineering of management in the next decade will be a necessary rekindling and radical redesigning for survival in a competitive global environment to achieve improvement in performance and quality output.

The human relations challenge will improve without negatively affecting workers morale and output, as organizations reduce the workforce and redesign the work of remaining personnel in the organization.

Outsourcing for key functions will continue in the future such as accounting, Human Resource Development, Production. With the revolution taking place, organizations will have the option of hiring and retaining the best talent.

It's naive to think that organizational structure will become anachronic. Structure, hierarchy, and accountability will remain valuable for routine and mature problems, functions, and processes in business operations.

On the other hand, too much structure or structure in the wrong places is bound to go away, as the science of management improves to better enable the identification of areas of business where structure is detrimental.

Decentralization of management is enabled by technology. But let's not fall into the (common) trap that technology will completely transform business practices.

Ecolologic tragedies over the next 20 years will call into question the primacy of profitability as the main determinant of stock price. Corporations which abuse the environment and other stakeholders will lose their charters. So, managers will have come to learn how to develop and execute strategies that balance the interests of competing stakeholders. Their compensation will be based on their effectiveness in doing so.

There has to be a restricted flow of information. The environment is encouraging the individuals to grow at an unprecedented rate than required.This is creating an imbalance adding to frustration, loss of commitment and leading to an reduction in creativity and innovativeness among peers.The concept of generic skills sets should be undermined. A management has to aim at making a person wise over the years and not just by encouraging a practice of providing more than what is needed even though there is huge demand for individuals and also competition for hiring.

All principles including management principles all seem to undergo continually two phases i.e. convergence and divergence. At a time the world was governed by one central roman empire which broke up into several democratic countries. Now we are talking of United Nations. At on time, all information was stored in the Mainframe before it was split into standlone computers now, we are talking of huge networked servers. Command and control structures could give way to decentralised decision making but this will eventually re-emerge in better ways in the future.

Twenty year from know I perfectly see:

1. More decision making from the operational level, because they are the relation between the organization and the client. This mean that the top executives have to give more attention to lower levels and with them developed the correct strategy.

2. In the motivational area, there is a tendency to look for the quality of life of all members of the organization, especially for those that are valuable, so flexibility and sense of belonging are going to be the key elements to create the write environment for motivation

The question is almost too broad to make a specific projections, 20 years into the future about one specific characteristic of "modern" industrial organization, that will be the most antiquated. More often than not we tend to reflect what the organization won't be like because we either sense or experience a trend that leads us to draw a conclusion that is limited in scope. The question is academic at best and trivial at worst because the question is not about what or how we will be doing things, but rather what we won't be doing.

More important to the implication of the question is or what should, in your opinion, be the most important characteristic affecting the "modern" industrial organization over the next 20 years? This would probably better reflect a general trend in the culture and climate of the organization, regardless of size, and/or nature of the business. This approach will also take into account the external influences that appear to be having more of a role in "how we get things done" that establishes organizational principals, practices and structure; they will not become antiquated or anachronistic or maybe they will cease to exist.

Twenty years from now, the Chinese will own most of the globally influencing organizations with top management mostly consists of highly skilled and intelligent professionals from India. The western world will become protectionists and erecting walls to insulate against change and progress. But inter-continental travel and the internet will make those protectionist measures irrelevant. However, basic human behavior will not change. Pursuit of wealth at the individual level across all countries, companies and organizations will remain as high a priority as ever.

My vision of future managemente for me is very different. I believe managers will be very similar than teachers or guardians who will have also their own teachers/guardians. Focus will be in how to have better thinking skills and emotional skills to deal and lead people. The higher the level, the higher focus in the skill development. The lower the level, the higher focus on operations/common tasks. Management and skills will be developed starting in school (7-8 years old). World will be the playground to practice. The key thing to care will be that the new guys will need to be trained vey closely in principles and morals. Without this, there is no management or skill that values anything.

In twenty years I wish to see the typical organizational hierarchy vanishing and being replaced by "teams" working on "projects". I also wish the "Chairperson" cincept, imported from the military, challenged so that the individual powers of employees would be realy unleached.

To me, the one feature that would appear the most antiquated or anachronistic 20 years hence is the concept of organisation itself. There will be nothing like what today passes for organisation. No buildings, no cubicles of executives, no rows of staff, no conferencing, no commuting, no passing up and down and sideways of documents and data, no flashing of computer screens – in short, all familiar landmarks would have yielded place to a virtual, wireless, borderless world, running on a single digital currency, and perhaps with the help of a single language, with palm-held devices recording, coding, sifting and analysing transactions, and offering instant menus of options suited to given situations.
All decision-making and communication will be from wherever one is
There may still be need for manufacturing outfits, but production processes will be robotised, as indeed they are even today in certain industries. Orders will be directly fed into the robots which will take care of their execution and delivery in conformity with specifications at the specified time.
Meanwhile, technologies, especially in the field of materials science, non-conventional and renewable sources of energy, including bio-fuel and cold fusion and genomics would be so far advanced as to bring about convertibility of any material into any other, elimination of disease and comforts for the asking.
There will be no need for huge outlays on any enterprise, and this will result in a phenomenal fall in overheads.
Fanciful? Not more so than the marvels of science and technology, social engineering, economic miracles, impressive improvement in the quality of life and the revolution in life style that one sees today. Not more so than how mention of television and space travel would have sounded to our great grandfathers.
We ain’t seen nothing yet. You think it, and it is going to happen!

This theory is based on two major dependent evolution of business in the future.

1. Technological advancement is made to the man kind, eco and environmental benefits in a shared basis. In other words, shared larger vision drive the technological advancement in every front and is accessible to every individual across the globe (e.g. Open source,)
2. Non existence of intellectual property, Central repository of knowledge and technical know how shared among every individual across the globe. Thus redefining and surpassing (excelling) the then existing technology become common.

The concept of large corporations or organizations headed by few individual leaders will be obsolete in two decades. Large organizations will break into micro / macro teams which could play several roles according to the needs arise as they see and we would see the micro management of tasks into excellence by each team across the globe. Then the management becomes a conscious culture threaded into our social behavior.

A look into twenty years from now is a very interesting task but very difficult too, since who can predict what technilogy will be driving the world and also management 20 years fropm now. I think the answer is hidden in this question i.e. if we are able to predict the technological, economic and socio-cultural environmnet of the future, 20 years to be specific we shall be able to answer this question too. Some of my perceptions about this are,
-- No creation takes place witout destruction of the old first. The first one to go is the present day organizational structure.
-- I see flexi organizations in the form of Rapid Deployment Management forces, enabled for multi-tasking ,holistic management tasks.
-- Customer empowerment and participation in not just production and design of services and products but also in strategic visions and management of all businesses.
-- Spiritual dimension being added to the present day soul less mechanistic and over materialistic ways to manage.
-- Automation would rid managers of more mundane duties and give more time to more creative and innovative activities.

Mohan Kotwal, Ph.D.

All the management principles or concepts are nothing new to any time and generation to change over time.Go to history or religion all these modern management techniques were avialable and used over centuries.Only the form and practice may change with the tide of time and requirement.The hirarchy,command,control,delegation and team work are basic tenets of the administration which will survive in some or the other forms in any type of management.

A human being evolves in the society in all aspects.His behaviours, his mannerism , his food habits , his values etc all come from society.However, who forms this society - family , friends , schools , colleges , places of work and many other miscellaneous factors.However , his journey from childhood to the time he becomes a adult ready to work is the one which has one of the most profound impacts in his future life , it is this phase where the seeds of his future are sown and it is this journey that evolves him as a person.This childhood to adulthood journey is quite a roller coaster ride for him , it is this phase where his innoncence is at it's best and his learning is at it's maximum and there are 2 extremely important factors of this journey of his evolution:

a>Family
b>Education-schools and college

The family is the institute where he is himself (he does not fake) and every family has a set of rules created by them due to their own understanding and due to the society norms.Rules to maintain discipline etc are very impotant and good but a family writes some rules which invariably makes a child accept norms as it is (without trying to find why these norms) and it is at this moment he gets chained by these norms and remains chained till he dies.This chain must be removed and the the role of a family has to be redesigned in such a way that it does not chain the child but prompt him to ask the why of this chain is it at all necessary??????Remove the chain which binds the child.

The education institutes be it schools and colleges are equally responsible in chaining the students by again superimposing norms in such a way that they will always remain chained and the simple reason for all this behaviour of the part of schools and colleges is that they themselves are chained.They are playing a pivotal role in shaping the society but they are also playing a pivotal role in chaining these children so that they become the replicas of what their school is or what their college is.Again the role of these education institutions must change and they have to give the children more space in such a way that they can create , they can unleash their potential and are able to stand up and ask a direct WHY to these opaque norms which has made their view opaque.

As man moves in the journey of life his evolution is constantly happening but it this journey from childhood to adulthood that shapes him , that sows the seeds of his very being.This period which is extremely critical to his evolvement should not be suppressed by restricting him through norms.It is like a fish which belongs to the sea but is restricted in the aquarium , first this aquarium should be broken and let the fish go where it truly belongs and that place is the vast sea.

Regards
Hemant