A couple weeks ago I was browsing through the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal and stumbled on an article titled “The End of Management”. Contrary to what it suggests, the point of the article is not to rid companies of management, but to challenge the perception of the role of management as it faces unprecedented change. One only has to look at the hyper-accelerated changes in the marketplace to realize that hierarchal or bureaucratic management approaches are outdated and in many cases are harmful to a company’s ability to adapt. This dynamic is captured in the following paragraph discussing creative destruction: “Yet in today’s world, gale-like market forces—rapid globalization, accelerating innovation, relentless competition—have intensified what economist Joseph Schumpeter called the forces of “creative destruction.” Decades-old institutions like Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns now can disappear overnight, while new ones like Google and Twitter can spring up from nowhere. A popular video circulating the Internet captures the geometric nature of these trends, noting that it took radio 38 years and television 13 years to reach audiences of 50 million people, while it took the Internet only four years, the iPod three years and Facebook two years to do … Read More
