Future Management Challenges

The business world has changed in the few years that separate us from the last century. Eight principal factors are worthy of special note.These factors all raise special challenges for management which is called upon to reinvent its role where growing complexity demands that each business is a “good business” (Mihaly, 2003), or perhaps a “harmonious business” (Baccarani, 2005), ensuring wellbeing for all the stakeholders and in this way be creative, innovative and competitive.With a view to assessing the business’s own perception of this need for change, starting with the model put forward by Gary Hamel and HBR (Hamel, 2009), we sketched out thirty action vectors aimed at reinterpreting the managerial role in transforming business into a dynamic and harmonious relationship with all stakeholders within and without the organisation itself.The objective of this work is to communicate the results of this explorative study carried out on a sample of sixteen enterprises located in north east Italy, one of Italy’s and indeed the world’s most industrialised areas, each of which was interviewed in depth using questionnaires that mustered together all the aforementioned vectors.The aims were: a) to see the priority challenges as perceived in the minds of management; b) to see how much of a gap there was between the felt need for change and the actual effort being committed to change; c) to measure the convergence, or otherwise, of management perceptions and theoretical projections of future change and trends.