Managing our emerging worlds

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The forces of globalisation and innovation are reshaping the modern corporation, making it more geographically dispersed, more networked (relationally as well as technologically), more culturally diverse, and less hierarchical. The implication of these changes is that we are at an inflection point in the nature of management, and therefore of management education, in some ways as significant as the change heralded by the Industrial Revolution. In my last column, I suggested that one can look at the management challenge engendered by this process in terms of a greater focus on knowledge, versus the other factors of production (labour, capital and resources). Another, more specific conceptualisation of the new century’s management challenges is in terms of four interrelated ‘emerging worlds’.

The virtual world is in many ways the product of Silicon Valley, being the descendant of all microprocessor-based technologies, though these have been combined with storage and communication technologies that had some of their roots elsewhere. From information sharing to interaction, economic transactions, and parallel lives and universes, the virtual world has become the means to fully express peoples’ desires to connect, communicate and collaborate. The embedding of digital technologies in a host of old and new products and services has created new kinds of businesses, and reshaped old businesses, internally (organisational forms) and externally (customer and supplier relationships).

The developing world is advancing at least partly thanks to the innovations of the virtual world. Distance is dissolving, and knowledge transfer accelerating. China and India, with a third of the world’s population, are growing at speeds unprecedented for countries their size, and important portions of their economies have been catalysed by the fruits of digital technologies. Even the world’s poorest, the ‘bottom of the pyramid,’ can at least be given hope by the connections and cost reductions enabled by the technologies underlying the virtual world. The promise of these developments is a more evenly balanced world in the long run, albeit with increased stresses and strains along the way. Management practice in the 21st century will have to encompass the new, multi-polar economic landscape—it will have to go well beyond the old management model shaped by the needs of GM, P&G and their cohorts.