Rewriting the Rules of Management for the Digital World

Our society is being fundamentally transformed by the impact of the internet, with rules of doing business being rewritten in one industry after another. The ever-accelerating rate of change is overwhelming the ability of the industrial economy to keep up. Economical, technological and societal forces are disrupting organizational bureaucratic hierarchy. Leaders today confront a world where the unprecedented change is the norm, where once-innovative companies are struggling to stay alive, and century-old business models are being rendered irrelevant overnight. The corporate world has clinged too long to a model of management which was designed for the manufacturing revolution which depended on standardisation, efficiency and control. Today’s companies have 21st-century internet-enabled business processes, which are built on top of 19th-century management principles. We are trying to run a 21st-century digital company on a printing-press era operating system. We need a revolution in management - a shift from the old command-and-control model to the new network model embracing openness, collaboration and relationship building. My talk explores companies from all over the world, from the US and Brazil to India and China, which have already implemented innovative management practices. We should all study them, learn from them, and together build the future of management.