The new trends in global business call for a refocusing of managers' thinking about business enterprises. In addition, they require a reorientation of the education of future business managers. FUTURE TRENDS IN MANAGEMENT lists some of the trends that will shape the executive of the future.
How well are U.S. executives mastering the management styles demanded by these trends? Not very well. In a scathing report released in 1988, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Commission on Productivity pinpointed corporate management's persistent weaknesses: preoccupation with short-term financial results, parochialism, lack of cooperation within and among U.S. firms, failure to train and motivate workers, and a chronic inability to rapidly convert innovations into reliable, well-priced products. "The typical company is just fire fighting, day to day," laments Duane Peeley, a Vice President of Arthur D. Little. "They're not doing any long-term career planning." Nor are enough leaders with the necessary skills being trained. Says Harvard Business School professor John Kotter, coaxing others to accept new work styles "demands skills and approaches that most managers simply did not need" in an earlier age.
To survive in the twenty-first century, future CEOs will have to "have an understanding of how to manage in an international environment. . . . To be trained as an American manager is to be trained for a world that is no longer there," proclaims Lester Thurow, economist and dean of the Sloan School of Management at MIT.
After interviewing scores of executives, management consultants, and business school professors, and after studying the managerial styles of some of the most successful U.S. executives, the editors of U.S.. News & World Report concluded that to be successful in the twenty-first century, chief executives will have to overhaul their thinking as well as their factories. The researchers identified the following four paramount traits of the ideal future executive:
Consultants at Arthur D. Little predict that the future will belong to the megacorporations-global federations whose senior managers will concern themselves chiefly with balancing the firm's economic interests with those of the local culture? 1
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