Grant starts with a warning: Gary Hamel is on the warpath again, still “rattling executive cages and inciting managers to revolt”, with his infectious enthusiasm undimmed after more than 25 years as a business school academic and consultant/management guru.

Hamel’s latest book, The Future of Management, makes two claims: that management systems and principles are founded on a hopelessly obsolete management paradigm; and that management innovation alone represents the ultimate source of future competitive advantage. He offers the internet as the best guide to the future of management, amplifying human creativity, aggregating the efforts of the many and offering real-time, distributed networks as the modern alternative to markets and hierarchies for co-ordinating human effort. He sees its widely distributed tools, ease of experimentation, voluntary commitment, power from below, fluid authority, self-defining communities, pervasive decentralisation, competition between ideas and peer-based decision making as the likely characteristics of successful future management.

But Grant is by no means convinced. He agrees with far-reaching changes in structures, systems and leadership styles for successful twenty-first century management, but not with a new management paradigm based upon distributed innovation, participative decision making and market-based mechanisms. Instead he sees the extension of existing management principles and practices to embrace higher levels of complexity – particularly multi-dimensional integration – plus greater reliance on informal structures including self-organisation as offering the more likely routes to future management success stories.

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