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Traditional businesses are struggling to recover from the economic downturn. They'll need to shift their focus from profits to authentic social engagement to have meaningful impact in the world.

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.

About half a century ago, Peter Drucker coined the term "knowledge worker" to describe a new class of employee whose basic means of production was no longer capital, land, or labor but, rather, the productive use of knowledge. Today, these knowledge workers, who might better be called professionals, represent a large and growing percentage of the employees of the world's biggest corporations. In industries such as financial services, health care, high tech, pharmaceuticals, and media and entertainment, professionals now account for 25 percent or more of the workforce and, in some cases, undertake most typical key line activities. These talented people are the innovators of new business ideas. They make it possible for companies to deal with today's rapidly changing and uncertain business environment, and they produce and manage the intangible assets that are the primary way companies in a wide array of industries create value.

In quantum mechanics, there is a well-known concept, called the wave-particle duality, which essentially means that all matter exhibits both wave-like and particle-like properties. In modern business, we have a similar duality with management and creativity. Well, almost.

The bulk of my work concerns people's interactions with technology, and my field is currently in a remarkable period of development. Just five years ago, most people used computers and mobile phones through very limited means of input -- the tools essentially reduced the people using them to fingers: typing, pressing buttons, mousing, or maneuvering a joystick.

Over the last year, I've been doing a lot of research on how organizations will need to evolve to meet the demands of the 21st century. The central premise of this work is that new technologies, most of which have appeared only within the last decade, greatly amplify our abilities to interact simultaneously with large numbers of people. The frontier of human productive capacity today is the power of extended collaboration - the ability to work together beyond the scope of small groups.

The employees are a company's most valuable assets. So they say. But do they really understand what it means?