Management in the 21st century

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Academic writing for newspapers are free of the compulsions of work-a-day journalists, and can take a longer view of matters, in keeping with the standing of universities (for example, Al-Azhar, Bologna and Oxford) as among the oldest continuously functioning institutions in the world. At the beginning of the year, when there are many prognostications of what 2008 holds in store, I’d like to take an even longer period for my predictions. This means looking at broad trends rather than specific events—though understanding these trends can sometimes guide the particular.

With my own university planning a new management school for Silicon Valley, I have been giving some thought to the nature of management, and how it is changing, along with changes in the nature of the firm itself. The issue has great importance for India’s development, because it is human ingenuity in creating and managing organisations that harnesses for material gain the fruits of our parallel ingenuity in understanding and mastering the natural world. India’s managers, at home and in key positions in the US and elsewhere, have proved themselves to be world class whenever given a chance.

Even hunter-gatherers and early farmers had to manage resources, tools and teams, but modern challenges of management begin with the Industrial Revolution. The factory system and the assembly line required close coordination of workers and machines in those factories, to manufacture ever more complex goods in ever increasing variety. In some ways, this process continued through almost two centuries, culminating in the great corporations that dominated the industrial economies of the world, making steel, automobiles and engineering goods. As graduate management education became professionalised after the Second World War, managers were trained to work within these large corporate hierarchies, with the ethos of the factory system and assembly line pervading the head office as well.