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Design and "design thinking" is gaining recognition as an important integrative concept in management practice and education. But it will fail to have a lasting impact, unless we learn from the mistakes of earlier, related ideas. For instance, "system thinking", which shares many of the conceptual foundations of "design thinking", promised to be a powerful guide to management practice, but it has never achieved the success its proponents hoped for. If systems thinking had been successful in gaining a foothold in management education over the last half of the 20th century, there would be no manage by designing movement, or calls for integrative or design thinking.

At a recent Harvard Business Publishing post, Professor Teresa Amabile asked an interesting question: is management the enemy of creativity? Teresa argued that it was the bureaucracy in management that caused the gradual loss of creativity in big corporations. Therefore, a major revision of modern management must be up to the calendar.

t took decades to build the managerial foundations of the modern industrial enterprise, back in the late 19th and early 20th centuries-and it's going to take time for today's management pioneers to lay the groundwork for Management 2.0. These trailblazers need our constructive criticism and encouragement, and we should take time to provide it-because we all have a stake in their success.

Managers have lost legitimacy over the past decade in the face of a widespread institutional breakdown of trust and self-policing in business. To regain society's trust, we believe that business leaders must embrace a way of looking at their role that goes beyond their responsibility to the shareholder to include a civic and personal commitment to their duty as institutional custodians. In other words, it is time that management finally became a profession.

A couple of weeks back I (Gary Hamel) provided you with a synopsis of Vineet Nayar's new book, "Employees First, Customers Second," which has been recently published by Harvard Business School Press. In it, Vineet, CEO of HCL Technologies, talks about the progress his company has made in making managers more accountable to those on the front lines. Having posted my summary, I invited you to submit your questions to Vineet, and many of you did, along with plenty of piquant comments. Herewith, Vineet's reply. He begins by providing a bit of context, and then takes on a few of the most-asked queries.

An overlay of end-to-end process management onto existing functional organizations has its rough edges, to say the least. In fact, the transformation to a process-managed enterprise could really mean the End of Management, as we know it.

The greatest asset any company has is its workforce, yet too many employers fail to motivate their staff, writes management expert Gary Hamel in an edited extract from his new book

There's a crisis in corporate management. While the basis of competition has shifted decisively to innovation, most management tools and approaches are still geared to exploit established ideas rather than explore new ones.

The MIX is an open innovation project aimed at reinventing management for the 21st century. However, does it make sense reinventing management, without first reinventing companies?

What law decrees that our organizations have to be bureaucratic, inertial and politicized, or that life within them has to be disempowering, dispiriting and often downright boring? No law we know of. So why not build organizations that are highly adaptable, endlessly inventive and truly inspiring? Why not indeed. That's the goal that lies at the heart of the Management Innovation eXchange (MIX).

Today's enterprises are increasingly facing challenges of rapid change, hyper-competition and complexity. Old methods and structures can no longer support the agility that is needed. Time for a radical management makeover?

Creativity has always been at the heart of business, but until now it hasn't been at the top of the management agenda. By definition the ability to create something novel and appropriate, creativity is essential to the entrepreneurship that gets new businesses started and that sustains the best companies after they have reached global scale. But perhaps because creativity was considered unmanageable-too elusive and intangible to pin down-or because concentrating on it produced a less immediate payoff than improving execution, it hasn't been the focus of most managers' attention.

As time passes by, people and things change. Now, what if time passes by and people change, but things that should change, don't?\n\nIt is not a stationary relic I'm talking about. I'm talking about the brand new dinosaur on the block - the classical management pyramid. Time has come to dismantle it and adapt to a new evolutionary and unstructured model that leverages the team effect to ensure that companies can lead change rather play catch up or be left behind.

I'm a capitalist by conviction and profession. I believe the best economic system is one that rewards entrepreneurship and risk-taking, maximizes customer choice, uses markets to allocate scarce resources and minimizes the regulatory burden on business. If there's a better recipe for creating prosperity I haven't seen it.

The experience of growing up online will profoundly shape the workplace expectations of "Generation F" - the Facebook Generation. At a minimum, they'll expect the social environment of work to reflect the social context of the Web, rather than as is currently the case, a mid-20th-century Weberian bureaucracy.

I'm a big fan of New Yorker cartoons. There's usually at least one in every issue that provokes a wry smile or a wince of self-recognition. While I've never actually participated in the magazine's weekly caption competition, I occasionally gin up a prospective entry. Last week, the contest featured a drawing of a couple sitting in a living room. The husband (perhaps?) was perusing a newspaper on the sofa while his wife lounged in a nearby armchair. She was a mermaid-naked from the waist up, her large flipper resting demurely on the floor. With her head angled towards her companion and her mouth open in mid-sentence, I imagined her to be saying: "After ten years, I think you could have learned to scuba dive," or "Hiking in the Alps again? I thought we could take a beach holiday this year."

We barely manage the basic innovation process, but competitive pressure is already pushing us towards the next level. However, are we aiming at the right target?

In the present Xpragmatic View, we further explore the concept of organisational change as a management instrument triggering innovation and process improvement. Assuming the basic promise of this concept is correct, what type of organisational change do we have to look for?

The past belonged to push, but the future belongs to pull.\nThat's an argument we've made before and in our most recent post, "Why Do Companies Exist?" --as well as more expansively in this Journal of Service Science article. What will pull-based institutions look like? How will they be organized? What dispositions, or mindsets, will they require? And what management practices will help them succeed?

Let's face it, major organizational change is tough enough when times are good, but when they are bad and going south like now, it is doubly hard. People go into survival mode. Managers tend to become more hierarchical. The result is the change process can slow down or stall. Given the dire need for change that many companies now have, this clearly is a huge problem.