Business Philosophy & Strategy Changes Over the Last Four Decades

I was trading comments on a LinkedIn string recently and it made me realize, I have seen very little writing regarding changes in business practice over the last few decades. Maybe you find this interesting, maybe not... just personal observations over a 40+ year career. I will try not to include too much personal opinion and I certainly cannot opine on whether the change has been good/bad, or necessary/unnecessary. I will leave that for others to decide.

The concepts of generalist vs. specialist as the premier career path has changed substantially. The 20th century idea of working your way up and learning all jobs on the way, is dead. "The generalist" is a concept from a past 20+ years ago. Dead, along with employees who embrace the spirit of entrepeneurship and any one person who could make a well-considered frontline decision. In the 21st century, teams of specialists and team decision making has taken its place. Only knowledge/skills that can be reproduced in a maximum of 2-3 years are desirable in F500 companies. Top performing generalists are a business liability in typical thinking today, because knowledge/skills/experience are so difficult, expensive and time consuming to reproduce. That is why branding has replaced customer relationships and marketing is the replacement for professional salesmanship. I have lived this transition in the last 40 years. In my experience working directly for F500 companies and talking with friends, the typical Senior Executive today has chosen detailed process over initiative and outcomes have become less important than well executed activities. Results are managed as the sum of end-to-end processes and their effectiveness.

Transitions are always difficult. The hardest for me was moving away from my 80's business training/theory most prominently from Peter Drucker (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Drucker) paraphrasing - "if you can't quantitatively measure a goal, it is worthless" and Tom Peters (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Peters) paraphrasing - "business success comes from training/empowering frontline employees". They almost felt like my mentors back then. Business agility was at the forefront of everyone's thinking and philosophy, now... it is scale, consolidation and branding. Consolidation has created companies that are so large today, that small start-ups (outside of tech) can only find niches. Interestingly, I have found no one who wants to discuss these changes, even at the senior exec level.

Earnings per share / by quarter are critical today. Opportunity funnels are managed today (like in the past), but at levels much closer to the frontline. In my opinion, this is due to the focus on the quality measure being well executed activities, rather than outcomes. Middle managers are the only ones close enough to the frontline to oversee this granular approach to activities, rather than establishing concrete measurable goals as Drucker once espoused.

Rather than empowering frontline employees, they are asked to be one link in a much larger team of specialists. This requires multiple people to address even strategic thinking. This requires multiple inputs from sales, sales engineering, technical support, closing, marketing, branding, execution, resource management, deployment, etc. Teams have become so large today, that the key skills have become consensus building, consultative information gathering and understanding company culture. For successful employees, relationship management is no longer about clients, or even piers, it is now about managing up to teams of middle and senior managers. Top-down heirarchy and managerial decision making has become a thing of the past, except at very high senior exec levels. This may well be the product of younger generations that gravitate away from face-to-face communication, despise conflict resolution and are annoyed by direction from a single person.

I suppose you could look at your own situation and decide whether any of these thoughts ring true. This discussion may also help younger people in the workforce to FOCUS on these areas to enhance a successful career path. Bottom line, there has been significant change in businesses the last 20 years and embracing that change has become the key to success, or failure.