Management: Inventing and Delivering Its Future

The MIT Sloan School of Management, as conceived by the legendary General Motors
chairman Alfred P. Sloan, was founded in 1952 to draw on the scientific and technical resources of
MIT and approach the problems of management with the rigorous research practices for which MIT was
famous. Fifty years later, the Sloan School gathered international leaders in business and
management, MIT faculty, students, and alumni to address again the basic principles that should
guide business and management. This book presents the papers prepared by student-faculty teams,
speeches by business and world leaders, and summaries of the discussions from this special
convocation; taken together, they offer a guide to the future of management based on the hallmarks
of MIT and Sloan--creativity and innovation.The topics considered coalesced around three main
themes. First, and paramount, is the necessity of building and maintaining trust by means of
openness, transparency, and accountability; this was addressed in speeches by Kofi Annan and Carly
Fiorina and exemplified by the case study presented of Nike?s efforts to rebuild the trust of
customers. The increasingly complex conditions of the modern global economy emerged as another
recurring theme, as the participants considered the effect of the growing spectrum of stakeholders
on issues of corporate governance. The third common theme was the inescapability of technological
and scientific change, from the Internet as a marketing tool to the organizational impact of
information technology.