MY nine-year-old niece called on me recently seeking help for a school project on global warming. She wanted to know what I had thought about the issue when I was her age. I guess you can imagine my embarrassment. I had to admit that global warming had simply not existed for me.

I explained that when I was her age my parents had just bought a refrigerator and a black and white TV. Telephone calls were expensive and personal computers were considered an impossibility. The internet was not even imagined.

It was a shock for her that one could have lived and studied without these conveniences, and I clearly lost a bit of credibility. But it reminded me that today’s world is radically different from just a few years ago. As a management educator I am often worried that we have not adjusted our teaching and our models of management to reflect this new world. Change has come in many different ways. But for me there are five big areas in which change is truly influencing management.

Economic relations between nations has drastically changed and no one country is really dominating. We have all become interdependent, with organisations having to adapt themselves to this new reality. Large multinational organisations, but also smaller high-tech companies, need to work increasingly in networks. The concept of a centralised headquarters is becoming fuzzier.

This is complemented by a second change in organisational structure. Many companies focus almost exclusively on their core activities and out-source the peripheral ones. As a consequence they are very dependent on their partner-suppliers, which, as a result, have gained in importance. Suppliers have evolved into partners on an equal footing.

This has happened not only in the supply chains but has also occurred in innovation. True innovation is often created in networks. We see this all around us here in Cambridge where high-tech developments happen in a loose combination of firms that work in an organic eco-system.

On top of these we see an enormous change in employees. Many have become what is vaguely described as knowledge workers. Their value is determined by their expertise – they have less loyalty to their organisations and more to their profession, and resist working in hierarchies.

The fourth change is in the way these employees work. Knowledge workers need to develop a new approach to problem solving. Today children like my niece suffer from information overload, and the real challenge for experts is how to avoid being paralysed by all this information. This requires truly different skills and I am not sure we are yet fully addressing how to teach them.

These four changes all point in a similar direction: the world of business organisations is becoming flatter and organisations and people are increasingly working in networks. This observation is perhaps not new. Ten years ago there was already academic thought about networked organisations. The difference is that today the technology is available to implement such organisations.

All communications are becoming instantaneous and mobile. We can truly work in networks of peers. As a business school we need to challenge our organisational models in view of these changes, and in particular we have to ask ourselves how we define leadership. The old world was one of hierarchies. Today’s world requires leaders who can push, cajole and seduce their peers into action.

Collaborative leaders will need to be able to convince people and make them enthusiastic about their tasks. More than ever they will have to leverage the cultural diversity of their teams. They will need to work over large geographical and cultural distances. Their minds must be more synthetic than analytic. And they should learn how to use information as one of the most important resources for managerial action.

At Judge we have already started to prepare our students for collaborative leadership. It is not an easy task to implement. I am not even sure we yet fully understand its novelty and its complexity. But the world in which my niece will operate will definitely require a different type of leader than the one for which I was trained.

Arnoud De Meyer is the director of Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge

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