Here is a tricky question: How many living management gurus can you name who did not learn their trade in North America? I have asked many colleagues this question, and it's pretty hard to come up with a good list. For example, consider the individuals in last year's "Thinkers 50" ranking list. By my reckoning, there are only seven who make the cut: Richard Branson (Virgin), Kris Gopalakrishnan (Infosys), Kjell Nordstrom and Jonas Ridderstrale (Stockholm School of Economics), Lynda Gratton, Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones (London Business School).

Does this matter? I think it does.

In the years following the Second World War, the United States dominated the global business world completely--it was the major source of capital, the home of advanced manufacturing, and the source of most major technological developments. It provided the best quality management education, and it was the source of all the latest management thinking.

Today, we live in a more complex, more plural world. The US is now the world's largest debtor nation, and the biggest sources of capital are the large Sovereign Wealth Funds of the Middle East, Russia and China. Leadership in advanced manufacturing is spread across such countries as...

What would it look like if the rapidly-evolving social world of Web 2.0 collided with the sterile and static corporate Intranet? What would happen if information flowed from the outside in, instead of inside out?

Those are the questions at the heart of an interesting experiment unfolding at global consulting firm Capgemini .

A few years ago, in response to disruptive changes in its operating environment, Capgemini began experimenting with Yammer , a private and secure enterprise social network that allows employees to hold conversations, read posts, and actively collaborate with their co-workers in real-time. Chief Technology Officer Andy Mulholland says that activity is feeding the "collective consciousness of the 20,000 people who subscribe to Yammer internally."

Yammer is decentralising the information flow at Capgemini to create greater collaboration from the outside in. Far-flung IT consultants who work at client locations around the world make up about half of the firm's 110,000-person workforce. Those "edge-dwellers" are the most active users of Yammer. They're using it as a tool to help them deal with the variability they encounter in the field and to do more by tapping into a corporate knowledge bank in real time....