Management Inventing and Delivering Its Future

TheMIT Sloan School of Management, as conceived by the legendary GeneralMotors chairman Alfred P. Sloan, was founded in 1952 to draw on thescientific and technical resources of MIT and approach the problemsof management with the rigorous research practices for which MIT wasfamous. Fifty years later, the Sloan School gathered internationalleaders in business and management, MIT faculty, students, and alumnito address again the basic principles that should guide business andmanagement. This book presents the papers prepared by student-facultyteams, speeches by business and world leaders, and summaries of thediscussions from this special convocation; taken together, they offera guide to the future of management based on the hallmarks of MIT andSloan—creativity and innovation. The topics considered coalescedaround three main themes. First, and paramount, is the necessity ofbuilding and maintaining trust by means of openness, transparency,and accountability; this was addressed in speeches by Kofi Annan andCarly Fiorina and exemplified by the case study presented of Nike?sefforts to rebuild the trust of customers. The increasingly complexconditions of the modern global economy emerged as another recurringtheme, as the participants considered the effect of the growingspectrum of stakeholders on issues of corporate governance. The thirdcommon theme was the inescapability of technological and scientificchange, from the Internet as a marketing tool to the organizationalimpact of information technology.