In 1932, Aldous Huxley published his literary masterpiece, Brave New World, a dystopian novel in which all of society is built around the concepts of standardization and efficiency. In Huxley’s grim futuristic account, assembly line pioneer Henry Ford is revered as civilization’s founder: People erect statues of him, circulate his texts as a new Bible, pay tributes to him during Ford’s Day celebrations, and even revise notations of the years in which they live to the “era of Ford.” With humanity hailing productivity and order above all else, protagonist Bernard Max finds himself struggling in a world that cares little for things such as the unexpected, compassion, or independent thinking. 

Almost 100 years after the publication of Huxley’s novel, it seems society has largely avoided turning into the disturbing reality that formed the backdrop of Max’s life. Although Ford has undoubtedly become a respected brand, the odds are small that anyone will be referring to the current year as “the year 160 anno Ford.” And while standardization and efficiency have become important parts of our societal lexicon, they are far from being the only principles driving our lives.

Yet, when zooming in on the area of management, a more disconcerting likeness to Huxley’s novel presents itself: For many managers and business schools, standardization and efficiency still stand tall as core doctrine, spelling out much of how organizations are to be taken care of.1 For example, firms are still deemed to exist because they can handle activities in a more efficient way than others;2 bureaucratic hierarchies still represent the dominant organizational structures around the globe;3 and management lingo is still rife with terminology that portrays organizations as disproportionate machines (e.g., inputs and outputs, benchmarking, and key performance indicators).4 Management, as such, seems to have made a solid camp in the same brave new world the broader society has largely evaded.

Today, however, there is reason to believe this camp is about to be broken up; today, there is reason to believe that management — its ethos, tools, processes, and practices — is on the brink of being forced into new territory. Why? Because we currently are experiencing what can be understood only as a managerial tectonic revolution, arising from the interplay between several interlocking developments.

We believe five trends are reshaping the world of business as we know it — and that we in business schools and in practice are at the cusp of seeing management significantly revised because of them. 

Trend 1: The increased certainty of uncertainty. In today’s world of business, there is little left that can be solidly carved in stone. As the waves of a global pandemic, climate change, rampant inflation, geopolitical struggles, and technological upheaval are crashing onto every nation’s shores, firms are increasingly starting to realize that the age of robust prospects and durable expectations is waning. To be clear, this is nothing short of a bewildering experience for many: Although management fashionistas have been propagating the lingo of uncertainty and ongoing change for decades, the reality in many industries has often been far more languid. Now, however, it seems these stable times have come to an end for all and we are collectively racing into an era in which — ironically — uncertainty is becoming increasingly certain.

Trend 2: The digitalization of data analysis and idea generation. When browsing the media, one would believe the future of technology will be flashy and ostentatious: It seems hardly a day goes by without new developments being reported in a dazzling field such as self-driving vehicles, the metaverse, robotics, or space exploration. However, while such dramatic developments and promises make great headlines, their future importance will likely be dwarfed by technologies that are doing their thing much further away from the public eye. As recent advances in artificial intelligence and computational capacity allow us to gather, analyze, and render data in ways previously unheard of, organizations’ decision-making and idea-generating processes are on the verge of significant upheaval. What we decide will no longer be the critical thing to consider; rather, how we will come to decide it will.

Trend 3: The altered ways in which we do a job. For decades, how companies organized work was relatively straightforward: For a predetermined amount of time between two predetermined chimes of the bell, employees were expected to cluster together in the same location, with some being expected to plan and coordinate a set of activities and some being expected to execute or carry out those activities. However, the COVID pandemic showed that this way of working is not without alternatives. Working from home, flexible hours, increased autonomy, and more organic teaming are but a handful of the many changes in working conditions organizations have embraced — and often are still looking to embrace. Whether or not these changes have effectively ushered in a “new normal” remains to be seen. However, what they have done so far is make us realize that working conditions are not set in stone but are continuously enacted by the people who live according to them. 

Trend 4: The changing values of humanity. Even though technology is becoming increasingly pervasive in many industries, most organizations will continue to rely on the actions of people — at least for the foreseeable future. People, however, are rapidly altering the core values they are bringing to work. As the impact of climate change and social inequality are becoming more and more apparent, our workforce is refocusing its fundamental beliefs and values. It seems the well-worn emphasis on profitability and competitiveness is being gradually replaced by notions of sustainability and care for others. For firms, the potential impact of such fundamental shifts in values can hardly be overstated: With work being increasingly reconsidered as an extension of identity and self, employers failing to comply could rapidly find themselves on the losing end of tomorrow’s war for talent.

Trend 5: The resurgence of life over work. Closely related to the trend of changing values being brought into work is the notion of how work itself is being progressively revalued. As people become more and more transparent about their mental health and vulnerabilities, the status of work as a be-all and end-all has been increasingly challenged. With accounts of burnout running rampant in plenty of industries, many employees have started to carefully review the balance they strike between life in general and work in particular. (Even a well-esteemed prime minister of New Zealand announced in 2023 she was too burnt out to run for another term in office.) For some, such reflective exercises have resulted in bringing more of their personal life, or “whole self,” to the job.5 For others, it has resulted in the seemingly opposite move of “quiet quitting,” deflating the prominence of work with respect to overall existence.6 While seemingly different at first glance, we argue that both movements inherently relate to the same core development: that life is starting to reclaim the ground it has gradually lost to work.

Separately, one could expect that each of these trends would cause a stir in business. For some, the eventual impact of such upheaval would be profound; for others, far less so. So why does all this matter? Why is this not simply adapting to the rolling of waves as we have done so many times before? Why is this, for management, not business as usual? The answer is that these trends are not striking separately, neatly lining up to collide with the status quo one after the other. Instead, they are materializing near simultaneously, stirred up and prompted by several exogenous events such as COVID, Russia’s attack on Ukraine, and the rapidly increasing visibility of global warming. 

These circumstances have pressure-cooked trends that typically take decades to develop and, when served simultaneously, interlock into a cycle of events that will be difficult for organizations to bypass or contain. For example, as the certainty of uncertainty increases, so will businesses be pushed to further digitize their decision-making, which in turn will further alter how people do their job. Such further altering of working conditions will set off increased reflections by employees on the relationship between life and work, which will ultimately lead many to further reconsider the values they uphold in general. Such developments will result in even more uncertainty for businesses and ⋯ you get the point. In this way, while management has long been able to retain its turf — i.e., its practices, its goals, its raison d’être — we expect most organizations will soon find themselves confronted with a revolution that will simply not allow them to remain vested in the same habits they have been cultivating for such a long time. 

So, if management can no longer stand on the same soil fortified for decades, how does it need to reinvent itself? If today is deemed to be the period of the fourth Industrial Revolution, management surely is ready for Management 2.0. After observing dozens of organizations facing this challenge — some successfully and some fruitlessly — we propose that the following five actions are vital for developing a new management playbook.

Action 1: Revalue the purpose of purpose. For many businesses in the past, purpose seemed hardly anything more than a series of words adorning the walls of the company cafeteria or the product packaging — lofty slogans meant to showcase to both insiders and outsiders what great virtues the executive team was aspiring to. Often, however, this asserted purpose seemed to be neither inspiring nor actively influencing employees’ everyday behavior (other than a rolling of the eyes, that is). In most cases, purpose simply proved to be one of those boxes managers had to tick because somebody, somewhere, was expecting them to. Too many experienced the purpose platform to be superficial — hypocritical even — developed and deemed important by too small a core group at the top. Yet life moved on, with little substantive change.

Today, such a superficial take on purpose no longer seems to cut it. As customers and employees become increasingly sensitive to the gap between businesses’ espoused intentions and their actual delivery on promises, organizations will have to genuinely figure out why they are doing what they are doing — and why anybody (both in and out of the company) should at all engage with the firm. This means that for management, emphasis will have to tilt away from doing things right to doing the right things. Rather than fixating on how tasks can best be performed, management will need to become more concerned with their outcomes and aspired value. Ask, “Is the reason why we are operating still truly meaningful to all our stakeholders? And is it actively guiding the way our people are behaving on a day-to-day basis?” If the answer to both questions is a resounding yes, we have seen organizational performance almost magically follow suit; if not, struggle is generally imminent.

One company that radically moved purpose into its core is Acorn Health.7 In 2019, the up-and-coming network of autism care providers undertook a drastic exercise to not only get at the heart of what it stood for but also bring such purpose to life. For every role in the company, the leadership team initialized reflective exercises to articulate how activities contributed directly to the firm’s leading beliefs. During monthly meet and greets, CEO Vicki Kroviak personally introduced every new employee to the firm’s core values and goals. Most notably, Acorn Health’s purpose became the cornerstone of the company’s internal and external competency model, against which both staff and clinicians’ performance were evaluated — ultimately resulting in roughly half of the caretakers of an acquired partner being let go due to perceived incompatibilities with the formulated vision. Although such moves may seem drastic at first, Acorn Health’s consistent calibrations paid off: While most clinical service providers were struggling to cope with the impact of the  COVID pandemic, the downturn at Acorn Health proved far less significant — owing in large part to its deeply embedded sense of purpose, according to company leaders. 

Action 2: Become achingly real. When talking about management to someone who is not in a managerial position, one sometimes finds that the practice’s reputation is not all rosy: In some of the most memorable conversations we have had over the years, people’s facial expressions hovered between mild disapproval and downright aversion. When drilling further down on the reason behind such antipathy, we found these feelings are rarely based on what managers do but typically originate in what managers say they do. Hypocrisy, secrecy, insincerity, and deception are among the vices managers are most often accused of.

Of course, not all non-managers consider management a field of secrecy and dishonesty. But the fact remains that both consumers and employees are becoming more and more sensitive about discrepancies between the walk and the talk of management. In many industries, businesses are being increasingly scrutinized in terms of both transparency and authenticity: Is management sufficiently open about what is going on with the firm, and is it communicating about such events in a sincere and candid manner? Transparency and authenticity, hence, seem to be rapidly scaling the ladder of essential qualities managers need to develop. While many may think they already possess these qualities, we have found that very few do. Ask yourself, “When we as a company screw up, do we generally let people know — or do we typically hold off telling everyone until reality forces us to? And when I screw up as an individual, do I always openly own up to my mistakes?” Generally, we have found that being real and open is much more complicated than it sounds. It takes courage and time to pick up these traits.

Two companies that have respectively been at the top and the bottom of this class are Airbnb and Better.com. Confronted with the global lockdowns that torpedoed much of the hospitality industry during the COVID pandemic, Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky chose to be painfully honest about where the company was finding itself.8 In a letter hailed by many as a master class in empathy and compassion, he laid out how the company would go above and beyond to help those being laid off secure new jobs — and how, despite those efforts, people would still be right to feel upset about it. Rather than focusing on sharing a professional message that avoided saying anything that could open the company to liability, Chesky chose to address his employees with an almost aching sense of candor, emphasizing how he, as a CEO, felt torn up from having to cut loose his staff. Better.com, on the other hand, handled a similar layoff situation in a far less genuine way.9 In a Zoom call that went viral for its lack of compassion and emotion, CEO Vishal Garg almost mechanically sacked nearly 9 percent of the mortgage company’s workforce. While harsh market conditions were raised as a justification for the move, “loyal lieutenants” were rewarded handsomely in back-office deals, ultimately stirring public outrage over a managerial lack of integrity and openness.

The Airbnb and Better.com cases illustrate how being real does not necessarily have to implicate big shifts but may very well boil down to a drastic change in how you, as a manager, connect to people and your business. In short, drop the facade and be forthright.

Action 3: Liberate your structure. Even though the age of fiefdoms is well behind us, it is remarkable how much emphasis our way of managing still puts on hierarchy and power through position. In many organizations, most significant decisions are still made by a select group of people, who often have very little connection to the nitty-gritty stuff their firm is doing. Over the years, as we immersed ourselves in the ways of working across numerous organizations, we were amazed by the sheer number of boundaries and hierarchical walls that are regularly constructed to keep up the company roof. In our experience, many businesses are still structured like castles, where only those at the top have a meaningful say in the ins and outs of the organizational kingdom.

The irony is that castles will leave you remarkably ill-defended in the emerging world of business. While castle-like structures are great in stable and durable times, they are far less suited to withstand the test of more tumultuous epochs. Instead, we believe organizations will have to structure themselves much more like a typical village: designed around smaller, autonomous units that are loosely related to a larger whole. Over the years, there have been numerous ideas about what such structural reconfiguration should exactly look like, including theories on networking organizations, agile designs, holocracies, and “teal” organizing. Overall, however, the core idea remains the same: If you want to restructure for the future, you have to redesign your organization in a way that allows you to draw more flexibly on the talent and capabilities of all those present in it and permits people to autonomously manage how they can best contribute to the value and performance of the larger whole.   

One example of a company that has been doing this successfully is Bosch.10 The German engineering and technology firm decided to redesign the way its power tools unit was managed, hoping to make it more responsive to the challenges posed by digitization and globalization while improving cross-functional collaboration. Rather than copy-pasting a framework, the company tailored the restructuring to its own needs, guided by core aims such as redefining the function of leadership, implementing open communication, flattening hierarchies, and securing permanent cross-functional teams. Ultimately, these efforts transformed the unit from an unwieldy and siloed behemoth into a vibrant microcosmos of seemingly autonomous yet related enterprises, which sent employee satisfaction numbers soaring. The Bosch example illustrates how castles are increasingly holding us back and how organizations can thrive when we manage them more like villages.

Action 4: Stop fronting and start backing. When management started as a field and a profession, it was believed that managers were to be the brains of a company while employees were to be the brawn. The former group was paid to plan, organize, command, coordinate, and control; the latter was paid to execute whatever managers thought relevant. Managers could often draw on education, former experience, or a network the ordinary workforce could not, and as a result, their judgment was considered superior to that of the “common man.” This frontline individual, in return, was to consider themselves lucky to be allowed to bask in the glow of their managers’ supervision, a logic premised on the (mis)assumption that their superior insight enabled others to perform as efficiently as possible.

While it is highly questionable whether this colossal oversimplification of people has ever worked in the best interest of organizations, it has become painfully clear that today, it certainly does not. With present-day employees being more educated, skilled, and informed than ever before in human history, managers are increasingly ill-positioned to govern the activities of others. In many cases, managers lack equal access to the bigger picture; in others, they know less of the details at hand. What’s more, the pace of today’s world is far less forgiving to dallying than it used to be. Nowadays, as issues pop up like critters in a game of whack-a-mole, decisions often need to be made quickly by those closest to the action. In this sense, conceptualizing management as an act of leading others seems increasingly counterproductive. Instead, managers will have to learn how they can flexibly back, support, and resource the efforts others are already self-managing more productively.

One excellent illustration of a company that has successfully taken its management approach from front to back is Novartis.11 Starting in 2018, the global healthcare provider revised its take on leadership, taking a decisive turn toward an “unbossed environment.” Acknowledging that today’s leaders are rarely the most knowledgeable people in the room, Novartis understood that for managers to keep adding value, their function had to be drastically reevaluated. By 2023, the company aimed to take its 20,000 people managers through an “unbossed leadership” program, meant to help leaders reimagine their impact on others and the world; accept a great deal of vulnerability, self-awareness, and change; and internalize the mindset and behavior shifts that are necessary to fully empower their team members. So far, results have followed suit, with the company reporting that teams are more engaged and motivated because of greater impact. 

Giving workers more discretion in how to act can also work on a much smaller scale. At Singapore Airlines, leaders decided to stop the strict monitoring of how many vouchers flight attendants offered to customers.12 Paradoxically, this led to attendants offering fewer vouchers that were considered groundless. As flight attendants felt trusted and empowered, they more carefully balanced customer perspectives with company cost considerations. Similarly, by giving flight attendants full discretion over what is being served in the cabin, the airline has seen its volume of waste drop drastically. Because flight attendants know best what people regularly ask for and what bottles are typically opened just for a single consumption, the airline was able to optimize its catering options in a way that ultimately saved millions of dollars. These examples, seemingly trivial at first, show how even small acts of leaders taking themselves from front to back can have a significant impact. Smart leaders don’t lead; they allow others to do what they know and leverage the  best of their capabilities.

Action 5: Kindle the synergy between work and life. Too often, we have seen firms where people drag themselves from their desk to the coffee machine, from the coffee machine to a meeting, from the meeting to a loathed presentation, from the presentation to another dreaded meeting — and so forth. When work has become such an integral part of our lives, why is it still so often managed in a way that leaves one gasping for air?

The answer, we believe, lies in the fact that many companies still treat work and life as a zero-sum game, where energy spent on either side is believed to be irreversibly lost to the other. In this logic, managers want employees to spend most of their energy at work, while employees want to maintain most of their energy for their “life beyond.” The funny thing is, we have found this antagonistic understanding of work-life balance to be generally false. When organizations support their workers  —genuinely support them — to position work as an integral part of life, we have found that outcomes are remarkable, with workers reporting higher levels of satisfaction but also being more willing to go the extra mile. How companies arrange for such a rebalancing can be wildly different: for example, providing flexible work-from-home options, extending generous parental leave, or offering employees the freedom to decide how much time off they really need. What is consistent in all these actions is that they break with the kind of zero-sum thinking that often ends up killing people’s energy altogether.

One company that has been genuinely repositioning work as a part of life is HubSpot.13 The CRM platform provider decided to offer its employees total flexibility to determine how their work could best fit into their life. With an “unlimited vacation” policy, employees can work whatever hours they want and take as much time off as they want, if it does not reflect poorly on their performance. In turn, its “use good judgement” policy allows people to make decisions much more freely on all matters of life in the workplace: Instead of reverting to comprehensive corporate policies and procedures, HubSpot encourages its employees to make decisions according to their insight. If decisions do right by the customer and the team, they are good to go.    

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As the new reality of working brightly dawns upon us, management can,and should, seize the moment to rethink its all too familiar ways. Only time will tell what will work and what will not, but pioneers have already shown us potential paths for success. Our proposed five actions can help you find your bearings in that explorative journey, allowing you to set sail beyond the “brave new world” in which many of us are still living and successfully venture out toward new and exciting territory. 

 

Other articles in this series

Bureaucracies Are Surprisingly Resistant to Evolutionary Pressures. Here’s How We Can Break Free

Restoring Trust in Management: A Way Forward

 

About the authors

Bart De Keyser is an assistant professor (i.e., lecturer) in strategy, innovation, and entrepreneurship at the University of Sydney Business School. He holds a PhD in management from the University of Antwerp and has worked as a researcher at HEC Montreal and Columbia Business School. De Keyser’s work focuses on organizational and managerial transformations and has been published in several top-ranking academic journals. 

Todd Jick is a leading expert in leadership and organizational change. He has had a long career in both academic and consulting work in this field and is faculty director of the Reuben Mark Initiative for Organizational Character and Leadership at Columbia Business School. He was a professor at Harvard Business School for 10 years and a visiting professor of organizational behavior and human resource management at INSEAD and London Business School. Jick has built several top-rated courses at Columbia Business School, receiving the Singhvi Prize for Teaching Excellence twice. In May 2024, Jick was honored with Columbia University’s 2024 Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching. The award recognizes his commitment to teaching excellence and is given annually to outstanding members of the faculty whose pedagogy fosters critical thinking and inspires students to engage the quest for knowledge as a value and as a craft. His textbook, Managing Change, has been the leading offering in the field for the past 15 years, and his more than 100 cases have been among the top sellers in case clearinghouses.  

 

Footnotes

1. P. Tufano, “A bolder vision for business schools,” Harvard Business Review, March 11, 2020, https://hbr.org/2020/03/a-bolder-vision-for-business-schools.

2. S. Denning, “Why today’s business schools teach yesterday’s expertise,” Forbes, May 27, 2018, www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2018/05/27/why-todays-business-schools-teach-yesterdays-expertise/?sh=58d01805488b.

3. M. Reeves, E. Wesselink, and K. Whitaker, “The end of bureaucracy, again?” BCG Henderson Institute, July 1, 2020, https://bcghendersoninstitute.com/the-end-of-bureaucracy-again/.

4. A. Piazza and E. Abrahamson, “Fads and fashions in management practices: Taking stock and looking forward,” International Journal of Management Reviews 22, no. 3 (April 2020): 264-286,  https://doi.org/10.1111/ijmr.12225.

5. M. Robbins, Bring your whole self to work: How vulnerability unlocks creativity, connection, and performance (Carlsbad, CA: Hay House Business, 2018).

6. S. Formica and F. Sfodera, “The Great Resignation and Quiet Quitting paradigm shifts: An overview of current situation and future research directions,” Journal of Hospitality Marketing & Management 31, no. 8 (2022): 899-907, www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19368623.2022.2136601.

7. T. Jick, “Core values in a time of crisis: Confronting COVID-19 at Acorn Health (A),” case study CCW210410A (New York: Columbia CaseWorks, Columbia Business School, 2020), www.thecasecentre.org/products/view?id=177108.

8. B. Chesky, “A Message from Co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky,” Airbnb Newsroom, May 5, 2020, https://news.airbnb.com/a-message-from-co-founder-and-ceo-brian-chesky/.

9. R. Maruf, “Better.com CEO fires 900 employees over Zoom,” CNN, December 6, 2021, www.cnn.com/2021/12/05/business/better-ceo-fires-employees/index.html.

10. P. De Morree, “Reinventing Bosch: A radically new way of working,” Corporate Rebels, September 8, 2021,  https://corporate-rebels.com/transforming-bosch/. 

11. Novartis, “We create an unbossed environment,”www.novartis.com/about/strategy/people-and-culture/we-create-unbossed-environment.

12. T. Jick, “Singapore Airlines: Continuing service improvement,” case study CCW070403 (New York: Columbia CaseWorks, Columbia Business School, 2011), www.thecasecentre.org/products/view?id=131795. 

13.  HubSpot, “The HubSpot  code of business conduct and ethics,” updated January 16, 2020, https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/53/IR%20Marketing/Code-of-Use-Good-Judgment%20(Revised%20May%202020)%20Final%20.pdf.