Most Prominent Management Trends

According to the Working Knowledge, a Harvard Business School publication, the five most prominent management trends of the 21st century are:

• Globalisation – The melting of barriers among nations and their increasing interconnectedness, accelerated by technology, has led to a change in the world order that has had a profound impact on global business.
• Technology – If the current wave of globalisation has been the driving force behind the most far-reaching and powerful changes in business, then information technology has indisputably been the facilitator.
• Sustainability and Corporate Social Responsibility – For business to be sustainable, and even profitable, our planet has to be sustainable. This realisation has hit businesses perhaps the hardest in recent times.
• The Study of Psychology – The study of human psychology – probing into cognition, motivation, behaviour and performance – has become a key pillar of organisational management.
• Business Ecosystems – These are groups of firms that together provide complex products and related services to meet end-to-end requirements of users across the value chain. This has important implications for management because innovation in business ecosystems has a character distinct from traditional, vertically integrated firms. Every organisation in the ecosystem has to be aware of the bigger picture.

Contributed by Dave Hornblow, December 2016