Future Of Management

4 Pages 901 Words

Management has been a constantly evolving philosophy that has been in development since the beginning of written history. Throughout the centuries and millennia, leaders, philosophers, and organizations have sought to create patterns that comprehensively and coherently deal with real-world issues. It should be noted that management is in a constant state of flux, based upon the realities, principles, and market conditions prevalent at the time. At the advent of the 21st century, the business community has been witness to change and corporate reengineering at a scale never seen before in human history. Globalization, advances in technology, and a new, determined focus on the bottom line has led to the demise of many businesses, and forced others to shrug off old ideas and processes for more innovative ones.
There can be little doubt that technology has played a critical role in the transformation of global organizations. Technological knowledge doubles approximately every three years, and in the last 100 years, the world has amassed more knowledge, technology, and information than all of the collective knowledge in human history previous to it. This exceedingly rapid pace of change has presented opportunities for companies that are capable of reacting quickly and efficiently, and has been the death-toll for those who cannot. Ideas like customer relationship management, e-procurement, and transactions through real-time databases have provided fledgling companies with the weapons to devastate competitors that are ten times their size, and have permitted some corporations to utterly dominate their respective markets.
Wal-Mart is a classic example of the latter. In the late 1980s, a small group of engineers located in a previously unknown corporate office in Arkansas were given the opportunity to integrate Wal-Mart's procurement and ordering facility into a web-based application that could interact with vendors and distribution s...