8 Ways Our World Has Changed Management

Over 52 percent of Fortune 500 companies who were big in the year 2000 are gone today. They have either gone bankrupt, been acquired, or ceased to exist as a result of digital disruption. The traditional top-down hierarchy model served its purpose through empowering the few and disempowering the many.

The questions many business owners ask when they hear about these companies failing are:

“How do I avoid that downfall?”

Today’s successful businesses need to be adaptable, innovative, and inspirational to thrive. In order to build a company that is adaptable and innovative for today’s world, you need to provide your team with freedom. But you have to strike a careful balance. Too much freedom, and you lose structure; lose structure, and your company ends up in disarray and chaos. Sound complex? Well, it is. But it doesn’t have to be.

Let’s look at where we have come from to where we are moving to, in overall business management approaches. For those of you who have experienced corporate management structures in the past 20 to 30 years, you will be nodding your head in recognition. For the younger millennials, the culture you are currently growing up in will hopefully be more in line with the modern management examples.

  1. Today’s management decisions are more customer-oriented, while older management hierarchies are company oriented.

  2. While old business managers tried to micromanage their employees by imposing decisions, new-style managers attempt to guide, lead, and inspire the employees themselves to make better decisions.

  3. Modern-day business strategies promote more employee participation in day-to-day business decisions, rather than isolating these decisions to executives of a certain tier.

  4. Businesses with a modern structure encourage more collaboration between departments and teams.

  5. Today’s successful businesses look for continuous improvement opportunities, while old ones only attempt change after monumental market shifts.

  6. Old-style businesses tolerate weak points and disarray in favor of keeping the status quo, while today’s companies eliminate these distractions in a timelier manner.

  7. Managers of today focus on implementing small changes effectively, while antiquated managers looked for big, sudden, even drastic changes. Old-style businesses were only ready to change when they absolutely had to.

  8. Old-school management strategies were more opinion-oriented while today’s strategies are more data-driven.

Instead of being shaped by an owner or manager’s personal choices or ideas, today’s smart managers know that looking at trends and information propel a company to success.

I talk a lot in my book, The New Intrapreneur, about how businesses and management techniques have evolved. The changes in business management have vastly stemmed from the change in the broader cultural climate that is around us. In the same way that our people and culture have changed over time, so has the way we manage them.

Learn more about modernizing your business and making an innovative impact on your business trajectory in my book trilogy today!