[MUSIC] My name is Julian Birkinshaw, I'm

a professor at London Business School and I am here to introduce Managing

the Company of the Future. In this opening segment, I'm just
going to give you an overview of the, the really,
the kind of the core ideas in this course. The first core idea is that
the business world is changing, it's changing in fundamental ways and in ways that
are going to require
us to adapt significantly. There are four major drivers of change. The first is
what we can call Web 2.0. We all know that the technology
is changing in the workplace, we all know that the Internet and
mobile telephony are making it possible to share information in ways that were
not possible even a decade ago. Web 2.0 refers specifically to the kind of
the, the organic version of the Internet, where by you and I will comment on
articles, we will share our ideas. We won't just look at web pages
because we will actually share and create content as well as,
as perusing content. That is what we mean by Web 2.0. And that is really a
fundamental change
that's affecting the business world. The second driver is what I'm
going to call Generation Y, sometimes called
the Millennial Generation. And Generation Y are people
born after the year, 1980. Who are now, often, in positions of
some seniority in the in the workplace. And these are people who
are not just tech savvy. But they're also bringing with them
a different set of values then perhaps the previous generation,
Generation X. Or the Baby Boomer Generation before them
had when they entered the workplace. They have an expectation, for
example they will hop jobs, they will not stay in one company for
their entire career. They have expectations that the work
they're doing is going to be valuable, that the companies that they work for, will
have some sort of
higher order purpose. And so of course, their expectations, their demands are
causing organizations
to think differently about how they work. The third major driver is
the emerging economies of the world, you know, the West, if you like Europe and
North America, has been dominant you know, for the last, really for
the last 100 years. But the China's and
the India's of this world, of course, very, very influential
countries a millennium ago. But they've been in a bit, in abeyance. And now what
we're seeing is enormously
successful Chinese, Indian companies, and of course, companies from Russia,
and Brazil, and so forth. Starting to become much more visible and
present on the world stage. Often coming to the world of business
with a slightly different angle, and certainly with lower costs. And they are
causing a lot of traditional
companies to have to re-evaluate the way they're working. And then,
the final driver is sustainability, the whole agenda around creating
organizations which don't just take care of the needs of a narrow
set of stakeholders. But they take care of the needs
of society, the communities in which they work, the future generations
of employees who will come after them. Put these four sets of drivers
together and in the middle, you end up with a set of
new strategic imperatives. There's lots of ways of talking about
this but let me just list four of them. Company's today say we
need to become more agile. They say we need to
become more innovative, both ways of adapting more
quickly to the changing world. They're saying that they
need to figure out ways of making their employees more engaged. And they need to
take
purpose much more seriously. And together this gives you
a framework if you like, for thinking about the big driver for
change in the world and the imperative, the strategical imperatives that
companies are trying to address. If that's the first set of arguments
about the way that the world is changing, we now have to switch to the,
shall we say, the model of organizing and managing that companies
are working with today. And here we have
a fascinating point to make, which is that the model
of organizing today is actually not very different to the model
[NOISE] that we had almost a century ago. I will explore this in more
detail in a later segment. But for the moment, it's worth just
acknowledging the kind of, the, the basic assumptions or basic principles
on which today's management model works. And I'm going to suggest
there are four of them. We coordinate activities
through bureaucracy, through standardized Rules and Procedures. We make decisions
through
the corporate Hierarchy, from the top down to a bottom basis. We motivate employees
through what
we might call extrinsic drivers. In other words, we pay people, we pay people to
deliver on,
on, on giving us results. We don't fundamentally work on,
on, on their, their other values. And, and finally, we, we, we set objectives
through a process of
what we might call Linear Alignment. What does that mean? It means that we as a
company will
often tell our investors we're going to make the following amount of
money two years, five years out. And then through a process of aligning all
the different parts of the organization, we give everybody
specific targets to meet, in order to meet this higher overall goal. So work back
for a, first of alignment,
from some sort of financial objective. That model of managing, as I say,
we'll go into it in a later segment. But that model of managing has been
around in, in most part for 100 years. And the interesting thing is, despite all
these changes I've talked about a few minutes ago,
this model has been a little bit inert. There's of course these
giant signs of change, but, when you look at companies today,
they still are using, basically, what we can call bureaucracy,
as an organizing model. Particularly large companies,
there's a slightly different story around smaller companies,
which I'll get to later. So you put those two sides together and
we see this fascinating tension emerging. And on the one side, we can see that,
that tension is being resolved
in the following way. People are arguing that we are on
the cusp of a revolution a, newer way of working, a brave new world. Where by the
future of work actually
looks dramatically different and lots of people have argued that
technology in particular is going to fundamentally transform the workplace. On the
other side we have the kind of
the contrarian view, that says look management as a way of working hasn't
changed because it's not going to change. [LAUGH] In some ways you can argue that,
you know, human nature hasn't changed, so why would we expect management to change?
There's a sort of a nothing new under
the sun school of thought that says look management is not going to evolve. And if
you put those
two contrary points of view together you can see there
is a fundamental tension there. There is a force if you like for
stasis on the, on the left-hand side and there is a force for
change on the right-hand side. These forces are both present and the way that these
forces resolve
themselves is in fact the kind of the most fascinating thing of all, about thinking
about the workplace of the future. So that is the tension that we, is
going to be at the heart of this course. The one that we're going
to be discussing as we go through the various different segments and
modules. So, that is my overview of the course,
it's called Managing the company of the Future and
those three words are all important. Managing, because we're really focusing
for the most part on what managing means, how it works, what are the principles
underlying our existing and our future models of managing. Secondly, the Company of
the Future,
well a company is obviously a, a construction if you like,
a way of, of organizing. That again, has got very,
very kind of strong, strong traditions. I'm not saying for a second that we will
all work in companies in the future. Many of us will act as freelancers. Some of us
will work in small companies. Some of us will work in,
in companies which are governed in very, very different ways to
the traditional way. But the point is that the company,
as a construct, is something that we actually have
to think about and tr, and, and, and really work out what the alternative
versions in the future will look like. And then finally the Future is the third
theme of the course, we are going to get very much into the details of what
the future of the workplace looks like, in terms of the driver for change. The
drivers for success and how we can
actually rethink the way that we work to steer ourselves towards
succeeding against those drives. So that's the overview of the course and we will
now get in to
the detail as we progress.