Speaking at the 1^st Global Peter Drucker Forum in Vienna was a great experience. Focused on The Future of Management, the presentations and discussions were energizing and thought provoking. The principle theme in all the discussions was that to realize the growth 21^st Century companies desire, organizations are becoming adaptive networks with evolving business models and strategies.

I came away from the Forum with affirmation that there is broad agreement the collaborative future is here…and we can no longer put off ensuring our organizations are ready for it. As Drucker prophesized in 2000, innovation is occurring in the very definition of the organization, its boundaries, and how it interacts with its stakeholders and communities. The Forum speakers and participants spent many hours discussing how, to be successful, the organization must innovate everything about itself, starting with how it’s structured and managed.

Keynote speakers at the Forum talked about what they learned from Drucker that is helping them understand the future of management and the organization. Professor Yves Doz stressed that strategic agility results from the interplay between a set of dynamic capabilities along the dimensions of strategic sensitivity, resource allocation fluidity, and leadership unity. And Professor C.K. Prahalad focused on the importance of seeing new organizational patterns in the data that is available to all.

Based on the practical experiences The Rhythm of Business has had over the past decade with collaborative networks, Professors Doz and Prahalad hit upon the right elements. My learning from Drucker is to take complex topics and state them simply. So I think of the future manager – what today’s manager must be – as a choreographer, rallying people and partners, their capabilities, and their resources around a strategic vision driven by the customer. And the organization that choreographer must lead is a collaborative network, the dynamic collection of businesses, individuals and other organizational entities that possess the capabilities and resources needed to achieve a specific outcome. As Prahalad points out, seeing the patterns in data and understanding what it means is essential for creating value for the organization, those that bring it capabilities and resources, and of course, for the customer.

Nevertheless, it is also clear to me that leading management thinkers are struggling with the implications and challenges of this transformation to collaborative network business models. I found this surprising given that the expertise organizations need to implement networked business models and collaboration dependent strategies resides in alliance management. That is, alliance professionals have a leg up on figuring this out since managing collaborative networks is what they do. However, what concerns me is that the discipline of alliance management hasn’t been able to get on the radar screen of senior leadership.

In all my years of working in alliances and with alliance professionals I fail to understand why this is the case. I’m looking forward to the upcoming Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals Global Summit where the Collaborative Innovation Council will tackle this question — When innovation is collaborative and done in networks, what is the role alliance managers should play in innovating how their organization is managed?