It’s hard to imagine how something that has changed so little over the past few decades—in this case, the hierarchical, bureaucratic management system that governs life in large organizations—might change dramatically in the years to come. Nevertheless, a while back my friend Tom Stewart, the editor of
Harvard Business Review, and I posted the following question online:
Looking twenty years out into the future, what one characteristic—principle, practice, or structural feature—of the “modern” industrial organization will appear to be the most antiquated or anachronistic?
Over the course of a few weeks, we received more than one hundred responses from managers around the world.
