As the era of “unprecedented times” refuses to end, many of us have become accustomed to an almost exclusive focus on the here and now. Recent years have delivered a nonstop crash course in putting out fires as we contend with simultaneous social, environmental, health, and economic crises (not to mention the ordinary frustrations and challenges of everyday life).

In an unpredictable world, a bit of tunnel vision is only natural. But at the same time, it’s still critical to zoom out and consider the bigger picture. With Harvard Business Review celebrating its 100-year anniversary this fall, we wanted to better understand how the practice of management has transformed over the past 100 years — and how it might change in the next 100. And so we asked a diverse group of researchers from around the world the following question: What management practice from the past 100 years will not — or should not — be continued in the next 100? Their edited responses follow.

[Here are the first three of eight responses.]

Managing for Fluid Organizations

Sut I Wong is a department chair and a professor of communication and leadership at BI Norwegian Business School.

The fourth industrial revolution — defined by disruptive growth in blockchain technology, robotics, artificial intelligence, high-performance computing, and other core digital capabilities — is fundamentally transforming how organizations operate. New tools are enabling increasingly decentralized, autonomous, and boundaryless business relationships, including labor models such as crowdsourcing, on-demand gig work, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), and other forms of democratized and participative decision-making. What does this mean for management?

Nearly a decade ago, management scholar Rita Gunther McGrath identified three eras of management. In the execution era, managers took a command-and-control approach. The second era emphasized expertise. McGrath argued that this era would ultimately make way for one of empathy, in which work is centered around value creation conducted through networks and collaboration between machines and humans rather than through rigid structures and relationships.

Although McGrath’s framework predated the concept of the fourth industrial revolution, the development of new technologies has led to exactly the kind of empathetic management practices she envisioned. With the proliferation of digital tools enabling increasingly dynamic organizational structures, full-time employees are joined by gig workers, crowdsourced workers, and community members, necessitating a new approach to management and decision-making. Practices tailored to a static corporate structure may have been effective in the era of expertise, but they are unlikely to apply in the tech-enabled empathy era of the future. Instead, we need to rethink the rigid management practices of the past and develop, test, and iterate on practices better suited to value-driven fluid organizations and a rapidly changing world.

. . .

From the Art of War to the Art of Seduction

Frédéric Fréry is a professor of strategy and innovation management at ESCP Business School.

Price war, target market, chain of command. Why do executives so often sound like generals on the battlefield? A hundred years ago, the distinction between business and the military was far less clear than it is today. As recently as the 1970s, business strategy was often taught by military officers who looked to generals such as Sun Tzu and Carl von Clausewitz for management insights. That made sense, because the businesspeople of the day were almost exclusively veterans, for whom it was only natural to apply wartime experiences to business endeavors.

But the analogy has become less and less relevant. After all, the goal of business is not to annihilate competitors — it’s to attract customers. Business is not about conquering a territory, subjugating its people, and capturing its resources; it is about understanding the needs and desires of customers and delivering a product they choose to buy of their own free will. Modern management is as much about persuasion as it is about command. So rather than endlessly study the art of war, managers in the next hundred years might look to master the art of seduction.

. . .

A Decentralized Approach to Global Expansion

Lele Sang is a global fellow at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

In the past, multinational corporations often took a highly centralized approach to managing their overseas divisions, developing a single global strategy and asking each region to adopt it essentially wholesale. That often led to impressive economies of scale, low costs, and other efficiencies — but it’s no longer tenable to ignore the unique characteristics of individual markets.

For example, the Chinese market operates orders of magnitude faster than many more-mature markets do. New competitors can become major threats overnight; new consumption habits, such as digital payments and livestreamed shopping, can take hold seemingly without warning; and new policies and regulations can rapidly impact business. Succeeding in this environment requires fast decision-making and customized solutions. Relying on standardized global strategies won’t work.

Moreover, asking regional managers to adhere to global strategies that may or may not make sense in a local context can be extremely demoralizing to on-the-ground teams. In my research I’ve seen time and again that limiting local employees’ autonomy is a recipe for dissatisfaction, disengagement, and turnover.

To understand the benefits of decentralization, I interviewed executives at Sequoia Capital, which has made such a shift. When Sequoia first expanded overseas into the Israeli market, it employed a traditional, centralized strategy that ultimately led to failure. But it learned from its mistake and took a radically different tack when entering the Chinese market several years later. Sequoia entrusted its China team with developing its own strategies and making its own investment decisions, with little interference from headquarters. The company was united by shared values, culture, and financial interests, and of course it had some systems in place to monitor and coordinate international operations. But gaining traction in China would have been impossible without its fundamentally decentralized approach.