What is the future of management?
In the face of all these challenges, can management be reinvented to make it more effective as an agent of economic progress and more responsive to the needs of employees? Some say it can’t. Henry Mintzberg argues in his most recent book, Managing, that the nature of managerial work has not changed noticeably in the 40 years he has been studying it. Management is fundamentally about how individuals work together, and the basic laws of social interaction are not susceptible to dramatic change. Indeed, it’s interesting to note that most of the major innovations in management — the industrialization of R&D, mass production, decentralization, brand management, discounted cash flow — occurred before 1930. If we extend this logic, we could conclude that the evolution of management has more or less run its course; that, to use Francis Fukayama’s famous expression, we’ve reached “the end of history” with regard to management progress. But we haven’t. Of course there is some validity in argui
