[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.
