Management’s Three Eras: A Brief Historyby Rita McGrath
http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/07/managements-three-eras-a-brief-history/
This leadership
transition is incredibly powerful and clearly worth reading the blog and following up with further investigation.
In a recent column in the Harvard Business Review, I argued that we are in the midst of a transition from a view of organizations as machines. It used to be that predictability and accurate replication of activities were what management was all about. Then, we began the era of the knowledge worker, when organizations began to create value by parsing information and services. Today, I think we’re moving toward an era of empathy, in which the most significant advantages companies create consist of creating complete and satisfying experiences that customers will enjoy…..
….Today, we are in the midst of another fundamental rethinking of what organizations are and for what purpose they exist. If organizations existed in the execution era to create scale and in the expertise era to provide advanced services, today many are looking to organizations to create complete and meaningful experiences. I would argue that management has entered a new era of empathy
