“Sometime over the next decade,” warns renowned strategy guru Gary Hamel in his new book, The Future of Management, “your company will be challenged to change in a way for which it has no precedent.”¹ What’s even more worrisome, he argues, is that decades of orthodox management decision-making practices, organizational designs, and approaches to employee relations provide no real hope that companies will be able to avoid faltering and suffering painful restructurings.

McKinsey partners Lowell Bryan and Claudia Joyce, in their recently published book, Mobilizing Minds,² arrive at a similar conclusion from a slightly different perspective. They find that the 20th-century model of designing and managing companies, which emphasized hierarchy and the importance of labor and capital inputs, not only lags behind the need for companies today to emphasize collaboration and wealth creation by talented employees but also actually generates unnecessary complexity that works at cross-purposes to those critical goals.

Forward-looking executives will respond to this looming challenge, these authors conclude, by bringing the same energy to innovative management that they now bring to innovative products and services.

The opportunity is substantial. Against the backdrop of the digital age’s dramatic technological change, ongoing globalization, and the...