The manager of the 21st century

The fifteen years to end of this century should logically produce greater changes in society and technology than ever before. What will be the characteristics of the managers of the new century? This article reviews the survey taken at the end of 1985 and early in 1986 of groups of successful managers of different nationalities and of different disciplines, as part of a research project to produce the picture of the Year 2000. The information collected from these interviews was supplemented by a variety of Round Table discussions involving managers from such companies as ITT, Ford, Mobil, Texaco, Dow Corning, Levi Strauss, GB-Inno-BM, Dechy Univas, Honeywell Bull and the Hilton Corporation. Managers were American, British, French, Dutch, German, Belgian, Italian, Swiss, Danish and Swedish. In an attempt to create the profile of the manager of the 21st Century, the very first interview which was held produced a statement, "If anyone had told you in the 60s what the 80s would be like, you would have said they were crazy". This statement hung as a backcloth to all subsequent discussions in the survey of the Manager of the 21st Century. These interviews were conducted by TASA (Benelux) over a period of almost a year with more than seventy senior marketing, personnel, and finance executives, as well a their chief executives, in order to help build a skeleton of what their view would be of the manager of the year 2000, and subsequently to try to add flesh to that. The survey is not yet complete, but the picture of tomorrow's executive, so far as it has been revealed, and the complexities which he or she will have to tackle, demonstrate a person we may all recognise, but not necessarily envy.