Is “Curator-In-Chief” the future CEO?

I had lunch with Bruce Nussbaum today, which is something you should definitely do if you get the opportunity. Bruce is a brilliant thinker, one of those people with whom a lunch conversation runs a mile a minute, touching on all sorts of interesting things.

One of the things we talked about was what is the place of management in an era when all companies are ecosystems, employees have entrepreneurial mindsets, and senior execs have VC mindsets? It has seemed to me for a long time like “management” the way we think of it (which is really just about 100 years old as a practice) may already have an expiration date on it, one that is not too far off in the future.

If that’s the case, what comes next?

It’s something I’m still thinking about (and if you’re in management, you had better be thinking about it too!), but Bruce threw out an interesting idea: if all companies are ecosystems, then the job of the chief executive really comes down to deciding what to bring into the ecosystem and what to keep out of it. Curation in other words. Curating the team, curating the culture, curating the vision.

If a company is an ecosystem, and we do away with traditional top-down management (which becomes less useful and more counterproductive the more entrepreneurial the employees are), then what is left looks more like an organic process of creation and less like a machine optimized to produce a product over and over. And that organic process requires masterful curation to make it work just right. Get the elements just right, and everything starts dovetailing and building on itself. Get it wrong — and there are a million ways to get it wrong — and elements start working at cross purposes, or canceling each other out, or creating dissonance. It’s a task that looks simple from the outside but is deceptively difficult to master. And it’s something that is always ongoing, never finished.

That’s an interesting vision for the future of management, and one I like.