Editor's note: This is the second in a series of three posts (previously published in The Wall Street Journal ) introducing the Moonshots for Management that now make up the framework for the MIX. We're republishing them here to give an introduction for those readers of the MIX who may not be familiar with them, as well as to provide some of the rationale behind the moonshots for those are already acquainted with them. In case you missed it, we published the first post here last week.

What is it about the way large organizations are currently managed, structured, and led that will most imperil their ability to thrive in the decades ahead?

Given that, what sorts of changes will be needed in management principles, processes and practices if we are to build companies that are truly fit for the future?

In May 2008, 35 management scholars and practitioners gathered to debate these questions. (For more background on the conference, see my earlier post, Management Moonshots Part I .) The goal of the conclave: to develop a portfolio of grand challenges for reinventing the work of management. Dozens...

I’m a big fan of New Yorker cartoons. There’s usually at least one in every issue that provokes a wry smile or a wince of self-recognition. While I’ve never actually participated in the magazine’s weekly caption competition, I occasionally gin up a prospective entry. Last week, the contest featured a drawing of a couple sitting in a living room. The husband (perhaps?) was perusing a newspaper on the sofa while his wife lounged in a nearby armchair. She was a mermaid—naked from the waist up, her large flipper resting demurely on the floor. With her head angled towards her companion and her mouth open in mid-sentence, I imagined her to be saying: “After ten years, I think you could have learned to scuba dive,” or “Hiking in the Alps again? I thought we could take a beach holiday this year.”

One of my favorite New Yorker cartoons shows an office worker slumped against the wall, clutching his chest. As worried colleagues rush to aid the stricken employee, he mumbles: “Don’t worry, it was just a fleeting sense of purpose.”

These sardonic portraits of the human condition resonate with us because they capture something deep and true. The mermaid-out-of-water...

I’m a capitalist by conviction and profession. I believe the best economic system is one that rewards entrepreneurship and risk-taking, maximizes customer choice, uses markets to allocate scarce resources and minimizes the regulatory burden on business. If there’s a better recipe for creating prosperity I haven’t seen it.

So why do fewer than four out of ten consumers in the developed world believe that large corporations make a “somewhat” or “generally” positive contribution to society? (This according to a 2007 study by McKinsey & Company .) Why is it that only 19% of Americans tell pollsters they have “quite a lot” or a “great deal” of confidence in big business? (In the 2010 Gallup survey , only Congress scored worse.) It seems that a majority of us expect big companies to behave badly—to ravish the environment, exploit employees and mislead customers. When it comes to feckless irresponsibility, big business seems to be in the same league as Tiger Woods and Lindsay Lohan.

Some blame Wall Street for this state of affairs. In March 2009, the Financial Times claimed that the “credit crisis had destroyed faith in the free market ideology that has dominated Western thinking for...

In the years ahead, any leader who hopes to have followers will need to carefully examine the foundations of their own authority. Why? Because we live in a world where the effectiveness of positional power is rapidly diminishing—at least outside of prisons and elementary schools.

Thanks to Enron, WorldCom, Adelphia, FEMA, Lehman Brothers, AIG, Fannie Mae, et al , the generation now joining the workforce has an extraordinarily jaundiced view of authority. They are deeply (and often rightly) suspicious of large organizations and those who run them. In their view, it’s not titles and credentials that make a leader worth following, but mission, self-sacrifice and world-class competence. Another worrying trend for centralization-minded leaders—an accelerating pace of change that penalizes organizations with lumbering top-down decision-making structures.

While the Facebook Generation must still contend with trickle-down power structures at work and in school, they have experienced a ubiquitous and powerful alternative: The Internet. The Internet is flat, open and meretricious. Nevertheless, there are thousands of natural hierarchies online. Pick any subject, search the blogosphere, and you’ll uncover a hierarchy of influence—some blogs receive higher authority scores than others. Visit any online discussion group and you’ll find that a few frequent...

Bold innovations often take time. That’s why progress must be judged both in relation to the starting point as well as the final destination. For example, in America’s space program, the first successful docking of two orbiting spacecraft, the Gemini VIII capsule and the unmanned Agena target vehicle, took place on March 16, 1966. While this was an important milestone, it was still just an intermediate step in the long journey to land a human being on the moon. While the commander of Gemini VIII, Neil Armstrong, would ultimately walk on the moon, that wouldn’t happen until 1969.

In my experience, fundamental management innovation is also a multi-stage, multi-year process. This is true for several reasons. First, in a company that has been around for a while, it’s impossible to start from scratch and hazardous to move too quickly. Innovators in a decades-old company don’t have a clean sheet of paper. Moreover, they have to make sure that the business keeps running while they’re developing and testing their new management practices. That’s why the transformation at HCL is still a work in progress, and needs to be judged as such.

Second, radically-minded management...