Get ready to redefine management. It no longer resembles anything that Adam Smith, Frederick Taylor, Henry Ford, you, and I understood for a century. The new realities of a fast changing world are only just beginning to shock us out of our wits. In the Gulf, most firms have witnessed almost twenty-five years of uninterrupted, straight-line growth in a stable environment. In such an environment, managers merely had to do more of the same to remain successful. Such straight line growth doesn't exist anymore, and so the simple strategy of more of the same is the perfect prescription for corporate disaster. The environment is neither routine nor predictable under any circumstances. Consider this triple sundae of surprises:

a. One fine day Iran wakes up and closes its doors to imports, the next morning fetches news of a spiraling yen, the following week finds the Turkish lira going through the floor. On the political front Yemen fights to break up, Pakistan threatens yet another change of leadership, And all this in a matter of a few fleeting months. Forget stability. Brace yourself for an environment that is becoming increasingly unstable, accelerative, and unpredictable.

b. As if this were not enough, companies have to contend with the gut-wrenching terror of technological tricks. Biotechnology, computers, electronic money, transnational business, the convergence of computers and telecommunications, information highways and internets, virtual reality and three-dimensional graphics, robotics and artificial intelligence -- all such developments are accompanied by equally important social, demographic, and political changes.

c. Yet another set of changes has just arrived in the UAE. The spate of recent Government legislation on costs of services and criteria for residence in the country is the third scoop of the surprise being dished out to business. This alone has the power to wrench far-reaching changes in the spending habits of residents and business opportunities of the region.

When such waves of change strike society, traditional managers discover to their surprise that the very skills that helped them succeed in the past guarantee failure in the future. If businesses fail to recognize these tectonic shifts or dismiss them as a bad dream that will go away, they will soon become relics of the past.

The new realities have no place for the manager of yesterday who believed in "Command and Control," and ran his outfit with the "I tell, you do" adage. We now need a new kind of leadership with a whole set of new skills.

These skills include the ability to dismantle central offices and headquarters staff, trust people at the very lowest level, deliver at their doorstep the authority to do whatever it takes to get the job done, train and educate staff continuously to remain current and useful, let go of power and authority, encourage, coach, and inspire staff to perform better, every time, all the time.

That isn't all. It includes telling people the truth, taking risks, embracing failure and learning from them. Don't merely expect failure. Can you make it a requirement? Do you have the guts to show your troops that success stems from continuous experimentation? This requires courage and conscience. Moving away from centralized control to decentralized operations and knowledge sharing, embracing curiosity and creativity, imagination and intellect, requires a complete overhaul of all that we grew up to believe.

Perhaps the easiest way to duck the issue is to blame circumstance. Well, listen to Bruce Barton about leaders: 'Nothing splendid has ever been achieved except by those who dared believe that something inside of them was superior to circumstance'. And ABB chief Barnevik is a shining light of this belief system. When Swedish robotics maker ASEA decided to merge with Switzerland's Brown Boveri's power engineering group in 1988, hardly anyone could have dreamed of the immense opportunities that would shortly appear in the East. Hardly anyone that is, barring Barnevik. When the Iron Curtain parted a year later, he saw a one-time opportunity to expand his $28-billion-a-year conglomerate. Today ABB is the most powerful investor in the former Warsaw pact countries. Shrewd management has enabled it to control 58 companies with 20,000 employees in 16 countries and is on the prowl for more. And by the way, corporate headquarters is like before, with a staff more near 200 than 2,000.

Heed the words of Harvard Business School's Amar Bhide: "The industrial age was about building an ever larger economic scale. We moved from props to turboprops to jets. We built bigger systems to distribute bulk goods. We increased the capacity of our mainframes. Today computer networks, telecommunications, and decentralized management are reducing that scale." The best evidence of this is available in Bhide's wife's activities - she has expanded her Indian curry paste business via PC, fax, and modem. The lesson -- Information Technology and the leveraging of knowledge are leveling the playing field for the competition between big and small businesses.

The key challenge facing management in the twilight years of the twentieth and the dawn of the traumatic twenty-first is to somehow unleash the creativity and intellectual capabilities of people in organizations, and shrug off the elephant chains of bureaucracy, archaic rules, and regulations that strangle free thinking.

Such organizations will be "radical" rather than "reformist"; only then can they fit into the emerging pattern of social and technological transformation gripping the world including the Middle East. Organizations will have to rethink the way they do business and take a leaf from Barnevik's life, or be consigned to the museum of corporate dinosaurs. The choice is clear: either shock the future or suffer future shock.