Thursday, May 29, 2008 – The Management Innovation Lab (MLab) launched their inaugural conference this morning. I wrote the following "news report" from 2055 on the future of MLab last night. Of course the Gary Hamel quote is fictional; we’ll have to wait a few years to find out what Gary really thinks about the first 50 years of MLab:

Saturday, May 29, 2055 – This year we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Management Innovation Lab – MLab. Wow! It’s been quite a ride! Like many great discoveries throughout history, the key insight that has driven the lab over the past few decades is so blindingly obvious in retrospect that it’s hard to believe that it met with so much initial resistance. But the move from securities based on the accumulation of assets “stocks” to those organized around the liquid flow of assets "flows" was not an obvious lever for management innovation in the first decade of the 21st century.

As we all know, the 250 trillion dollar Global Flow Exchange (GFE) has now largely absorbed the old stock exchanges. Of course this VirtualSpaces trading infrastructure only captures about 25% of the total value created in the global economy today. So the real significance of this shift has been the birth of Flow Management (FM) which according to a recent MLab study now supports over 86% of all global commerce. FM was clearly the child of the Millennial Generation’s embrace of social networking and multi-player games at the turn of the century. The 20th century idea of working for "a firm" has been largely replaced with FM Transactions by knowledge workers globally. This shift could have actually been predicted based on a 1937 article by Nobel Prize winning economist Ron Coase.

This morning we caught up with 101-year-old Management Innovation Lab co-founder Gary Hamel at his London home. Hamel modestly chided us, "It’s fun to reminisce on the past but frankly I’m much more interested in talking about the next 50 years..."

© 2008 - All Rights Reserved