Management Challenges in A New Time

As the year 2000 approached, so too did the years 5760, 2544, and 1420, according to the Jewish, Buddhist, and Moslem dating systems, respectively. Still, the coming of the year 2000 held meaning for most Western societies, serving as an opportunity for broader speculation about the new millennium and the 21st century. In the field of management, cycles of boom and bust in Asia had called into question new ways of organizing hailed in the 1980s, and questions and concerns mounted about inadequacies of 20th century views of business firms. Opinions were astonishingly diverse and often contradictory, but the central theme was change--dramatic change--and the idea that, to cope with it, managers ought to strategize anew and shape and reshape their firms.