Determining the Right Management Mindset for Today Competitiveness

Traditional management is an area that is extremely difficult to delineate. Change is a permanent feature of human societies. Today, we are living in a confused transition period to a new age defined by global competition, uncontrolled change, faster flow of information and communication, increasing business complexity, and persistent globalization. The economic and political changes over the last century have led to rapidly changing contexts of management marking an entirely new era of business. This new environment is also characterized by "more far-reaching technological advances, and a consumer who has adjusted to this quicker pace and whose fickle preferences are revised with the speed of a television commercial." (Pasternack & Viscion, 1998).

According to Hanson, D., Dowling, P., Hitt, M.A., Ireland, R.D., and Hoskisson (2005) "The traditional management mindset cannot lead a firm to strategic competitiveness in the 21st Century landscape. Managers must adopt a new mindset, one that values flexibility, speed, innovation, integration and the capability to learn from constantly changing conditions. The purpose of this essay is to critically analyse the characteristics of the traditional mindset and the 21st century landscape to gain better understanding of their thought, and also to study and question the different approaches given to the issue by great strategists such as Igor Ansoff, Henry Minztberg, Michael Porter, and Jay Barney. The scope of this research is to determine if the traditional mindset is obsolete and intend to prove the hypothesis of strategic management for the 21st century as a mix of traditional and modern view instead of a complete transformation and discard of classic approaches.

The "Traditional Management Mindset" refers to the long-established idea about management as a top level hierarchy position, based in recognition, control, and authority, placing managers as self capable of analyze the internal and external business

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