The new millennium of managerial thinking. This is not just turn-of-the-century rhetoric: sweeping changes in the geo-political alliances of the world, daily leaps forward in telecommunications, a better-educated environment of competition than ever before - these are the characteristics of the 1990s that are sweeping away the last remnants of the Industrial Age and have yet to develop an identifiable definition of the immediate future. Management in all areas of endeavor - but particularly business - faces new challenges, new problems. It will be the purpose of this paper to study a few of those problems.
The methodology will be as follows: a number of current articles from popular business publications will be selected, then briefly described, in order to identify management problems as the participants themselves consider them. The publications used will be top-selling magazines in the country that cater to a broad range of business interests. In keeping with the intent of this study to focus on participant-evaluation of current management problems, entrepreneurial and business-theory publications were not used. Nor were articles related to small-business management; this was a matter of scope consideration, since the management field is rich in resource materials.
After describing each article individually, a summary of the top three management problems of today will be derived. Following that process of examination, this paper will look at suggested solutions to those problems as proposed by the participants themselves. As a final step, this paper will offer its own conclusions as to which solutions seem to provide the best direction for future management choices.
In "Management, The New Model: Tearing Up Today's Organization Chart" (Business Week, 18 November 1994, pp. 80-90) journalist Paula Dwyer in London leads a cadre of business writers from Hong Kong, Cleveland, New York and worldwide business news b...