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By Tom Groenfeldt
Forecasts of the future workplace are often purely domestic and focus on issues such as telecommuting. Lynda Gratton, a professor of management practice at the London Business School, takes a broader view as she reports on progress halfway through a four-year study that is sponsored by leading international companies such as BT, SAP, Tata and Thomson Reuters.
Gratton puts social networking in a provocative context by comparing it to existing corporate governance, which she says remains command and control, with baby boomers in control. She suggests that social networking across corporations and countries could "shift the balance of power from within companies to the micro-entrepreneurial-rich ecosystems that will increasingly dominate their value chains."
The shift to Gen Y will also make a big difference, says Gratton, because they want greater work-life balance and “they tend to be co-operative and empathetic.”
Perhaps more interesting, and something she hits on tangentially, is the international effects of the next generation of managers. Universities and business schools are increasingly encouraging or requiring that students study in another country for a term or a year, sometimes on a foreign campus of the school they are enrolled in. Corporations now often require international experience to qualify for their most senior positions, and social networking makes it easy for people to keep in touch with college and grad school friends and former business colleagues.
Gratton notes that innovative research and development, once nearly monopolized by the West, has already moved abroad to a significant degree, and this is even before the Indian and Chinese entrepreneurs who have worked in or run companies in the U.S. return home in large numbers.
Knowledge work is a key to this change in management and working styles, says Gratton, who sees a rise in cooperative business arrangements, especially in telecommunications and IT.
"Executive boardrooms have been filled with the language of competition, with words such as winners and losers and battlefields the norm,” she says. “Over the past five years, it has been striking how this fundamental premise has begun to falter. Instead of competition, the discussion in the executive offices is increasingly of collaboration. While the former focused on bosses and hierarchies, and was about withholding knowledge and the exercise of personal power, this new way of management thinking is about working with peers and colleagues."
Gratton is going well beyond anecdotal evidence in her work, so it will be very interesting to see the results, and her commentary along the way to publishing the complete study. You can read more about her work, including descriptions of her previous books, at her Web site, lyndagratton.com. It's a good place to watch her progress.
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