Big Business Is Facing a Big Idea Drought
As globalization reverses, industrial policy revives, and AI rises, a once-creative management theory industry is running on empty.
Where have you gone, Peter Drucker?
Photographer: George Rose/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Management advice is one of the world’s most successful industries. Business schools have turned into the training ground of the new elite. Management consultancies bestride the world dispensing advice. In 2023, the US alone had more than two million management consultants and almost 115,000 business professors.
Yet this multibillion-dollar industry has lost the intellectual momentum and edge that it had during the 1980s and 1990s, when business schools and management consultancies reverberated with new thinking, and businesspeople hyperventilated over every new issue of the Harvard Business Review. Michael Porter redesigned strategic thinking by applying economic theory to business conundrums. Michael Hammer re-engineered the corporation for the age of smart machines. Gary Hamel and C. K. Prahalad anatomized the core competences of the corporation while Christopher Bartlett and Sumantra Ghoshal offered multinationals advice on how to restructure themselves for a new age of hyper-globalization.