With the end of the millennium upon us, many writers have put time and ink into considerations of how things will be different in the next century. This sort of fin-de-siecle prophesying is nothing new: Human beings seem ever mesmerized - no less today than were the medievals 1,000 years ago - by the symbolism of the end of a millennium. The common feeling now seems to be that resetting the calendar with so many zeros will mark a period of discontinuity with the past (even though - as purists like to note - the 21st century actually begins on Jan. 1, 2001).
Assuming that our information and technology systems survive the dreaded "Y2K" computer problem, the most accurate answer for most next-century questions may actually be a rather anticlimactic one: In the 21st century, things will be very much like today, only more so.
What does this mean for the field of management development? Organizational leaders have been struggling with the same challenges in various forms for the last 10 or 20 years and have yet to find generalizable solutions. Barring radical changes in human nature, the next few generations of managers will probably be found working through the same issues that they and their predecessors have been struggling with for much of their careers - only more so.
The Technological Revolution
Managers began coming to grips with 21st-century issues when they realized that most professionals had computers on their desks and telephones in their pockets and that both of these systems use networks to connect people who are often significantly removed from each other in time, space, thought and emotion. According to Price Pritchett in "New Work Habits for a Radically Changing World" (Pritchett & Associates, 1998), since 1983 the work force in the United States added more than 25 million computers, and the number of cellular telephone subscribers jumped from zero in 1983 to 16 million by the end of 1993. In 1993, more than 19 million people carried pagers, and close to 12 billion messages were left in voice mailboxes.
Separation once meant geographical and temporal discontinuity. It is a truism that our lives as managers and professionals (including how we communicate, how we work together and even how we think and feel) differ significantly now from our lives before the ubiquity of personal computers, cell phones and network connectivity essentially reformed our communities. Marshall McLuhan was astoundingly prescient with his ideas about a future global village, and historians of management will certainly look back one day with some amusement at a business era avant la technologie.
The truly successful managers and leaders of the next century will. . . be characterized not by how they can access information, but by how they can access the most relevant information and differentiate it from the exponentially multiplying masses of non-relevant information.
The Implications of Information
The biggest challenges for business leaders of the next century are going to revolve around coming to understand fully how global business practices have evolved - based on advances in the use of technology as well as the ability to connect with others and to be contacted by others, almost anywhere and anytime.
Consider that there has been more information produced in the last 30 years than during the previous 5,000 and that the information supply available to us doubles every 5 years, according to Mr. Pritchett. The truly successful managers and leaders of the next century will be determined not by what they know but by how fast they can learn. They will be characterized not by how they can access information, but by how they can access the most relevant information and differentiate it from the exponentially multiplying masses of non-relevant information. They will excel not by possessing traditional skills and tools, but by demonstrating a high degree of flexibility and adaptability in dealing with both technology and people and by being able to stay constantly meaningfully connected to others in the ever-changing world.
The differences between 1990 and 2000 will probably be less ex-treme than the differences between 2000 and 2010, as we experience a world that is demanding not only a rethinking of management competencies, but a fundamental redefinition of the social contract between employer and employee, between colleague and colleague, between worker and work itself.
Key Leadership Challenges
Major leadership challenges for the 21st century can be grouped into three categories: market forces, people issues and leadership competencies.
Market forces
Market forces will continue to drive change in organizations at a macroeconomic level, and these forces will demand more from our organizations and our leaders. For these purposes, market forces can be viewed as the cumulative effects of the behaviors and wants of those in the market either demanding or supplying a good or service. These forces include increasing globalization as well as (if recent trends are an indication) the creation of increasingly massive multinational organizations through mergers and takeovers. Coming hand in hand with increases in scale and a global footprint are a greater diver-sity in the work force and deeper requirements for specific technical expertise.
Larger organizations in most industries gain economies of scale as they distribute overhead expenses across more units of production. This leads to greater profits and stock valuation. Being global, or more precisely, offering products or services in a variety of countries and cultures, increases the size of the market to be served. Technology advances have greatly reduced the costs of reaching these different geographically dispersed markets. However, the market forces to increase size and go global do not necessarily lead to organizational survival. Of the 100 largest United States companies at the beginning of the 20th century, only 16 are identifiable today. Considering more recent history, of the companies in the Fortune 500 in 1970, fully one-third had ceased to exist by the early 1980's. And during the 1980's a total of 230 companies - 46 percent - disappeared from the Fortune 500. Obviously, neither size nor reputation guarantees continued success or survival.
In contrast to demand-based market forces, the supply of human capital is undergoing a pervasive and powerful shift. The supply of labor is more diverse, and individual workers must possess a greater degree of technical expertise to be successful. At an absolute minimum, companies must be able to accommodate diversity; the most successful companies will leverage their diversity to create new ideas and better match these differences to work demands. At the same time that organizations struggle with increasing deregulation (open and free markets), they will have to contend with an older work force that will find it difficult to stay abreast of change. Reinvent oneself or perish will continue to be the clarion call. Yet successful businesses will be those that do not forsake their own strong histories and foundations and do not undervalue their past learning and the ability to think metaphorically - because in these postmodern times what is old can rapidly become what is new, even at the same time as what is new today is nothing like what was new yesterday.
People issues
In the minds of many managers, people issues involve relationships with the staff of an organization. These issues are traditionally housed under human resources away from the core business and are seen as nice to attend to, but not critical. With the advent of the 21st century, these people issues are increasingly establishing themselves at center stage. Less than half of the work force in the industrial world will be holding conventional full-time jobs in organizations by the beginning of the 21st century: Every year more and more people will be self-employed, temporary or part-time. The United States' contingent work force - consisting of more than 45 million temporaries, self-employed, part-timers and consultants - has grown 57 percent in 15 years.
What may not be apparent to tomorrow's managers is that tomorrow's staff will have very different expectations of, and demands on, their organizations; importantly, the employee-employer relationship in the best organizations of tomorrow will look very different than it did in the 20th century. With their increased complexity and globalization, organizations are demanding skills and abilities from their leaders that are only beginning to be understood, never mind mastered. One of the most important of these will be the ability to balance employee needs (globally) and customer wants (globally and locally) - a balance that will become harder to strike, and to strike profitably and efficiently, in the coming years.
Diversity will become a strategic differentiator and not merely a desired demographic profile. The managers of tomorrow are growing up in a world where diversity is a productive, exciting and enjoyable reality, not a target achieved by setting quotas; today's most promising youth have known nothing but the postmodern world, wherein many of the traditional taxonomies, structures and borders (including those of race, ethnicity and other age-old social dividers) have not only been called into question, they have been subverted or simply ignored.
As the work force continues to grow more diverse, those able to accept individual differences in the workplace and to look at them as a source of creative energy and productivity will have access to a larger and more talented work force. Typical of postmodernity's general questioning of the idea of objectivity, there will increasingly be many right ways of doing most things - not just one right way as articulated in the employee policy book or previous norms of behavior. The work itself will increasingly demand the use of interdependent teams, as few indivi