Everybody has a Top 10 list and HBR is no different. Well, they’re a little different: Their editors came up with the Top 12 most influential management ideas since 2000 (“The Decade in Management Ideas,” Julia Kirby, January 1, 2010):

1. Shareholder Value as a Strategy. And not a good one. Even the guy who popularized it concurs. “Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy,” said Jack Welch. “Your main constituencies are your employees, your customers, and your products.”

2. IT as a Utility. Cloud computing is the latest step toward buying computing capabilities as services.

3. The Customer Chorus. Technical and social developments have given customers a stronger and more pervasive voice—and companies are finding ways to listen.

4. Enterprise Risk Management. Chief risk officers hold the new umbrella over pockets of risk that had been scattered, and addressed separately, throughout the organization.

5. The Creative Organization. The ability to produce creative output was seen as a competitive advantage to encourage through collaboration and diverse perspectives.

6. Open Source. Wikipedia, which represents the power of open source, was born in 2001.

7. Going Private. According to the article, “As the decade wore on, private equity’s playbook for turning around businesses was increasingly held up as best-practice management,” especially in the areas of strategic focus and governance.

8. Behavioral Economics. Rational thought alone does not explain human decision-making. Yup, that’s the 2000’s in a nutshell.

9. High Potentials. Some managers are more equal than others and you would be smart to develop them.

10. Competing on Analytics. The data you collect can be turned into intelligence.

11. Reverse Innovation. I don’t know where the clever name came from, but what HBR is focusing on is the emergence of huge markets in India and China.

12. Sustainability. By which, HBR means going green, and it declares that 2010-2020 will be the decade of sustainability.

From a Baldrige perspective, listening to customers, managing risk, promoting innovation (creativity), focusing on strategies and governance, developing managers, converting data into knowledge and knowledge management, and pursuing sustainability would rank as influential management ideas because they key components of a systematic approach to performance excellence.

As for improving HBR’s list, I would suggest the past decade also saw the proliferation of Lean and Six Sigma as process improvement methodologies, the emphasis on agility to respond more quickly to a rapidly changing environment, and widespread acceptance of the balanced scorecard as a way to measure performance.

Here’s hoping the list ten years from now touts the Baldrige model as one of the decade’s most influential management ideas.

To find out more about these topics, read:

• 9 Ways to Get Closer to Customers
• Anticipating Disruptive Change
• Making Innovation Part of Your Culture
• Transforming Measurement
• Get the Information You Need
• Knowledge Management 2.0
• 10 Steps to World-Class

(5 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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