Why Managers Still Matter

In today’s knowledge-based economy, managerial authority is supposedly in decline. But there is still a strong need for someone to define and implement the organizational rules of the game.

Nicolai J. Foss and Peter G. Klein

Fall 2014

We live in a knowledge-based, rapidly changing, networked world. A supposed hallmark of the new economy has been the decline of managerial authority. Modern organizations such as online retailer Zappos have come to favor flat hierarchies with widely distributed authority. We call such businesses “wikified companies,” using the wiki- prefix to denote the loosely structured, bottom-up, egalitarian structure popularized by the Wikipedia encyclopedia project and touted by management thinkers ...