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the idea in brief:

• "Modern" management, much of which dates back to the late nineteenth century, has reached the limits of improvement.
• To lay out a road map for reinvention, a group of scholars and CEOs has created 25 ambitious challenges.
• Unless management innovators tackle those issues, companies will be unable to cope with tomorrow's volatile world.

Harvard Business Review just keeps the great stuff coming. Just finished the February 2009 issue and loved the HBR at Large piece titled: "Moon Shots for Management" (link to executive summary).  What a super idea. HBR invited 35 management scholars and practitioners to spend two days in California identifying the sorts of changes needed in management principles and practices to build companies that are truly fit for the future. Participants included: Gary Hamel (The Management Lab), Eric Abrahamson (Columbia Business School), Tim Brown (IDEO), Steve Jurvetson (Draper Fisher Jurvetson), Kevin Kelly (Wired), Peter Senge (MIT), and many more...

After the event, a subgroup synthesized the master list of challenges that Hamel describes in his HBR article. There are 25 challenges and each is described in some level of detail in the article. What I'll do below is simply list "Management's Grand Challenges". Readers can add your own perspectives on what each means for you. I bolded my top 5 from the list of 25. The article is worth purchasing to have at hand or if you know someone with a copy, borrow it and read the piece.

1. Ensure that the work of management serves a higher purpose.
2. Fully embed the ideas of community and citizenship in management systems.
3. Reconstruct management's philosophical foundations.
4. Eliminate the pathologies of formal hierarchy.
5. Reduce fear and increase trust.
6. Reinvent the means of control.
7. Redefine the work of leadership.
8. Expand and exploit diversity.
9. Reinvent strategy making as an emergent process.
10. De-structure and disaggregate the organization.
11. Dramatically reduce the pull of the past.
12. Share the work of setting direction.
13. Develop holistic performance measures.
14. Stretch executive timeframes and perspectives.
15. Create a democracy of information.
16. Empower the renegades and disarm the reactionaries.
17. Expand the scope of employee autonomy.
18. Create internal markets for ideas, talent, and resources.
19. Depoliticize decision making.
20. Better optimize trade-offs.
21. Further unleash human imagination.
22. Enable communities of passion.
23. Retool management for an open world.
24. Humanize the language and practice of business.
25. Retrain managerial minds.

I selected my top 5 because I believe that passion and imagination are the most important factors for achieving success and winning.  I also believe that collaborative goal-setting and transparency when reasonable create an environment where hierarchy matters less and the team is bought into the mission and objectives. Which from the list would be your top 5?  Why would you choose them?