The Top Management Ideas for 2011

(MoneyWatch)  One way to get a sense of emerging business trends, which is truly news you can use, is to ask dozens of top management gurus what they will be working on in the coming twelve months.

HBR.org has done just that in The HBR Agenda 2011. The 24 top business minds queried here include everyone from Herminia Ibarra to Michael Porter. (See complete list below.)

Leading teams, smarter decision making and business uses for social media are under several microscopes for 2011. On the social impact front, thinkers talked about building $300 houses, encouraging entrepreneurship in sustainable energy and improving the delivery of health care.

Here are three big research agendas that caught my attention.

1. Getting Strategic about Being Social. Social media analyst Charlene Li says she will be studying the ways companies sort and analyze all that social data they have begun to gather. "Indexing the web is small potatoes compared with trying to make sense of social data," Li writes. "Everything from search engines to business intelligence will have to be rethought and reconfigured owing to the availability of these data, which need to be analyzed and used in real time, as they are being created. The signal needs to be inferred from the background noise. And privacy needs to be ensured."
2. Understanding the Modern Career Path. Wharton professor Peter Capelli says career paths have changed over time -- the era of someone working for one company their whole career is over, for example -- but no one is quite sure what the new career path is or how it works. "Most companies have simply turned the problem over to employees by allowing them to 'bid' on openings that interest the -- in the absence of any mechanisms or even information that would steer them in preferred directions. So we need facts to understand new career patterns, and we need models to help both individuals and employers think about managing careers."
3. Discovering -- and Lowering -- the Real Costs of Health Care. Harvard Business School colleagues Michael E. Porter and Robert S. Kaplan are looking to studies of competition and accounting to try to understand the economics of health care. Says Porter: "To be sure, the health care system does not lack for cost data. Ask about costs at any level of health care provision, and you will be deluged. But we actually know very little about costs from the perspective of examining the value delivered for patients. In particular, we do not know the total cost that health care providers incur to deliver care for patients' medical problems. There are two big puzzles to untangle: how costs are aggregated, and how they are allocated."

Join the distinguished list of thinkers below and tell us what you think will be the big ideas of 2011.

* Dan Ariely, Tim Brown, Peter Capelli, Thomas H. Davenport, Esther Duflo, Claudio Fernandez Araoz, Lynda Gratton, Vijay Govindarajan, J. Richard Hackman, Herminia Ibarra, Paul Kedrosky, A. G. Lafley, Charlene Li, Jack Ma, Jean Francois Manzoni, Daniel Pink, Michael E. Porter, Edgar H. Schein, Eric Schmidt, Klaus Schwab, Clay Shirky, Joseph E. Stiglitz, Robert I. Sutton, and Laura D. Tyson.

(Photo by Flickr user Flavio@Flickr, CC 2.0)