Preface

The work of managers worldwide has been undergoing significant transformation over the past three decades, in fact, changing more rapidly today than in earlier years. Their activities are being shaped by the influences of intensified, yet also localizing, global trade, use of ever-tightly integrated international supply chains, and even more by their extensive reliance on information technologies (IT) in myriad activities. The combination of evolving economic globalization and the cumulative effects of so much infusion of digital technologies and telecommunications into their enterprises has led to so many substantive changes in how managers work that today we can speak of a new style of managerial practices. That new style is also being influenced by human behavior and various values of societies and businesses from one part of the world to another. The recognition of this new style of management separates this book from the thousands of published declarations that everything is or has changed. It is also a rough jungle because so many players in so many countries and cultures are involved in the game.

Let's be blunt about the matter. Many managers, if not most, are poorly equipped to succeed in the years to come because their knowledge base is too narrow and the environment they must operate is becoming too complex. They are fed insights and facts on ever-narrower topics at work, through business publications, and often at school and university. I argue that their world is becoming so complex and so serious that they need to broaden their appreciation for how business is evolving in ways that are not normally considered. How they should come to better understand the world around them and how to succeed in it is the reason for this book. Put more formally, the primary objective of this book is to make readers-primarily managers-aware of the critical features of the evolving workplace in which they must succeed. A second objective is to define many of the behavioral attributes managers need to thrive in the evolving environment described in this book. Get ready to explore a great many topics normally not pulled together within the covers of a single book. But, don't expect detailed case studies or massive quantities of data, this book's purpose is to point out the obvious issues you will need to wrestle with over time. Get ready also to have to constantly relearn and reboot your knowledge base. How?

This book achieves its objectives by addressing the accumulation of changes that have been underway for some time, and that are continuing to emerge, as part of a larger fundamental process of shaping modern management. Relying on history and observations of current trends, it describes the context in which we work and both obvious and some not-so obvious implications, making recommendations on how management should function. It also defines many elements of management that have not changed, despite the hype. Activities are occurring, despite cycles of prosperity and recession that simultaneously affect the global economy today. It offers you ways to think about your role as manager so that you can optimize your effectiveness in what many consider to be rather turbulent and uncertain changes in the profession of management.

In addition to describing the evolving nature of management, it makes recommendations in each chapter on what to do as a result of those events. If you are impatient for answers, go to Chapter 6, which summarizes them, but then go back and read the other chapters so you understand why. This book was intended to be brief in order to quickly understand my point. If you pay attention, you will dig deeper on those topics that resonate with you right now and, hopefully, you will continue to do that for the rest of your career.

Key Ideas of the Book

The transformations-what I am calling changes in managerial style-are characterized by such features as the extensive use of massive quantities of numerical data to inform decisions, modeling of options from such mundane things as budget options with a spreadsheet tool on a PC, use of social media, to deploying super computers to conduct R&D and model market performance. Their organizations have spread around the world, integrating enterprises together of various sizes and roles, creating what today we call extended supply chains, while flattening the hierarchical structures of ever-larger corporations and smaller ones competing globally. All of these events occurred, and continue to occur slowly and incrementally around the world, not just in those national economies known for their early or extensive use of computing, for example, or in the richest national economies.

I have elected to discuss those current realities in which management operates that are the most important in affecting the success of management today and in the next several decades. I use this method of describing emerging features and implications of their new style of work. I use the word "emerging" because that process is still unfolding. Neither you nor I have the time to consume a far larger book that is more comprehensive. As managers have to do, we need to practice cognitive triage because there is too much information and managerial advice "out there" for anyone to absorb. And that is one of the lessons for management today: acquire the skill to select what needs to be understood right now and at what level of detail. Let this book be an example of that practice at work.

My intention is not to write a history or a full description of the evolution of managerial practices, although many observations are set in historical context, because understanding what has happened so far is absolutely crucial for understanding changes underway today. So bear with me as I offer more history than you might want-I use history because too many managers do not have historical perspective for context. The work performed by management is becoming more cerebral and success more dependent on understanding the context in which they work that goes beyond the normal fare of economics, prices, competition, and business practices and that must now also include history, sociological issues, culture, and, of course, the ever-changing and expanding role of IT. Understanding the context of your reality must extend across economic, technological, and business realities at a minimum, and ideally if you can absorb it, the social values of your environment at home and abroad, inside and outside your company, and appreciate the behaviors that are the results of those dynamics. My approach is particularly essential for those who have to deal directly with the consequences of economic globalization, governmental and regulatory globalization, and, of course, with the fact that today many of their firms spend between 7 and 15% of their budgets on information processing technologies and telecommunications, which themselves have become embedded in every facet of their business and who have to train their managers (and their workforces at large) in new ways of working.

We also have to deal with the fundamental problem that corporations are not doing as well as portrayed in their annual reports. Cheap money, inflated stock values, and the mess whole industries created for themselves and others in 2007-2009 through their inability to deal with complex issues, such as real estate derivatives, all hint that managers have a serious set of problems facing them for years to come. In the United States, the banking world has had to pay penalties in excess of US$100 billion, in Europe managers are going to jail, in China corrupt corporate leaders have been executed, and so on. Dealing with complexity and hidden realities is serious business.

I argue that the transformation currently underway in how managers do their work has not, however, fundamentally altered their mission, the raison d'être for why we have managers in the first place. Scholars such as Peter Drucker, Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., Gerald Greenwald, Adam Brandenburger, Barry J. Nalebuff, and Rita Gunther McGrath spent their professional lives describing those missions; I have no reason to displace their good work. Rather, mine builds humbly on their efforts, and upon that of such others who have followed them, such as Don Tapscott and Laurence Prusak all conditioned by historical perspective, solid observations, always paying close attention to broader social and economic contexts, and not just traditional managerial practices. So this book links the information-influenced work of managers to fundamental changes in the economy, in which the further integration of global industries, markets, and national economies are themselves influencing the work of managers, the "visible hand" in an economy that Professor Chandler described so well.

The Audience for This Book

Bluntly put, it is today's managers and those who aspire to be one. I speak directly to these communities, although with a tip of the hat to the academics and journalists who are helping to equip management with insights about running enterprises. This book is by and for managers about how our craft is evolving into a more structured profession at a time of enormous transition in global economics, political constructs, and technological transformations that extend beyond computing and telecommunications into many other fields. In short, they are working in a period of increased appreciation of the role of chaos in science and understanding of how people and societies function, and when businesses are entering a world...