If management 1.0 was forged on command and control and built on hierarchies, management 2.0 is all about strategic innovation and the flattening of corporations in ways that best capitalize on that scarcest of resources: human capital at the top of its game.

Many of the greatest thinkers on management today are convinced traditional management styles are dying an inevitable death. In his book The Future of Management, Visiting Professor of Strategic and International Management at the London Business School Gary Hamel - dubbed by The Economist “the world’s reigning strategy guru” - argues traditional management has reached the end of the road. To his mind the old management principles, with their focus on ‘incrementalism’ (improving the same product or service with more efforts) are dead; strategic innovation is the new name of the game.

And that strategic innovation, in the minds of Hamel and many others, is best served by tasking it to flat project teams. In Management 2.0, Hamel argues:

• Decisions are peer-based
• Resources are free to follow opportunities
• Commitment is voluntary
• Power is generated from below
• Communities are self-defining
• Everyone has a voice
• The tools of creativity are distributed widely
• It’s easy and cheap to experiment
• Capability counts more than titles
• Finally, just about everything is decentralized

So where the focus under Management 1.0 was on assets and ways of modelling and monitoring those assets, Management 2.0 is about doing much the same thing for workers, in an era where talent is king and the globe has shrunk enough to help organizations truly exploit it.