Moving from the Age of Specialization to the Era of Integration *

Abstract

The paper begins with a short identification of a set of forces likely to affect managers in the 1990s and discusses how managers frequently deal with such forces. The same set of forces is then viewed from a different perspective – through a new set of lenses constructed explicitly from historical trends and events. Finally, the paper proposes what managers might do in response to those forces when they are viewed through the new set of lenses.

We address four questions:

1. What are the forces managers must deal with in the 1990s, and what do those forces look like from a traditional management viewpoint?

2. What does it mean to say that we are moving from an age of specialization to an era of integration, and what are the signs that such a change is actually taking place?

3. What do the forces of the next decade look like when viewed through the lenses of a shift from an age of specialization to an era of integration?

4. How does the new perspective help managers (and others) make sense of the forces and decide what to do about them?

The paper suggests that one possible answer to that last question involves reframing our definition of management's responsibility for dealing with future forces. We think of the management task as facilitating the organization's participation in its environments in such a way that the viability of both the organization and its environments are enhanced. We refer to this way of understanding the role of management and the relationship of the organization to its environments as the ‘business ecosystem’.