Management Advice From John Micklethwait

The Economist editor on where business leaders need to focus.

Question: What is the most useful management trend today?Micklethwait:    Well, it's interesting you said that. We just agreed to update "The Witch Doctors" and the answer is I should have a brilliant answer for you.  But I think there are a lot of interesting concepts. I mean... that... definitely not pay for my friend, Chris Anderson who does "Wired," who's coming out with a book about "Free", where he deals with issues like [free human] and stuff like that.  And that I think is an interesting idea and that is going slightly against my instincts that people will [the way ahead of thinking] is to get people to pay in the end.  But a lot of the evidence that he produces and he produced it, he was fantastically right, I think, in many ways about the "Long Tail."  I think that's an interesting idea that people are shuffling around and coming out with new stuff and one interesting thing is the way that sort of journalists, in a strange way Chris is, strictly as a prominent example and very good at it. Malcolm Gladwell to some extent is in that frame of coming out that ideas that transfer into business life eventhough they're coming from that particular end and so that would be one of the changes that has happened in the long time since we wrote "The Witch Doctors."  When we wrote "The Witch Doctors," it was very much more [let me drop here and talk business], it was people and business community coming out with ideas rather than ones outside.

Question: What is the most useful management trend today?Micklethwait:    Well, it's interesting you said that. We just agreed to update "The Witch Doctors" and the answer is I should have a brilliant answer for you.  But I think there are a lot of interesting concepts. I mean... that... definitely not pay for my friend, Chris Anderson who does "Wired," who's coming out with a book about "Free", where he deals with issues like [free human] and stuff like that.  And that I think is an interesting idea and that is going slightly against my instincts that people will [the way ahead of thinking] is to get people to pay in the end.  But a lot of the evidence that he produces and he produced it, he was fantastically right, I think, in many ways about the "Long Tail."  I think that's an interesting idea that people are shuffling around and coming out with new stuff and one interesting thing is the way that sort of journalists, in a strange way Chris is, strictly as a prominent example and very good at it. Malcolm Gladwell to some extent is in that frame of coming out that ideas that transfer into business life eventhough they're coming from that particular end and so that would be one of the changes that has happened in the long time since we wrote "The Witch Doctors."  When we wrote "The Witch Doctors," it was very much more [let me drop here and talk business], it was people and business community coming out with ideas rather than ones outside.