HBR: Best Management Ideas From Last Decade

Editors at Harvard Business Review have posted their thoughts on the most influential management ideas to come out of the first decade of the 21st century.

Some on the list are no brainers: growing power of customers, sustainability, and open source would make most lists, we think. But here is one big idea that caught me by surprise.

Reverse Innovation. "The bigger story here is the maturation of the concept of globalization, particularly with regard to emerging economies. Most big corporations in 2000 saw them primarily as a source of natural resources and, increasingly, cheap labor. Then, as rising employment fueled the development of middle classes, cities in India and China came to represent valuable markets. Now, these non-U.S. consumers are coming to the foreground. Firms like GE and Microsoft are doing R&D in emerging markets, optimizing on those preferences and constraints, and then bringing the results back home."

Multinationals have always conducted research in foreign markets to create local products. P&G, for one, has followed low income housewives in Mexico to their homes to better understand their needs for detergent and cleaning materials. The twist that HBR spots is that companies are now using emerging markets to guide them in developing new products for mass markets.

Here are the 12 ideas listed by HBR. For more detail read The Decade in Management Ideas.

1. Shareholder Value as a Strategy.
2. IT as a Utility.
3. The Customer Chorus.
4. Enterprise Risk Management.
5. The Creative Organization.
6. Open Source.
7. Going Private.
8. Behavioral Economics.
9. High Potentials.
10. Competing on Analytics.
11. Reverse Innovation.
12. Sustainability.