Many years ago, management thinker Gary Hamel was praising Enron just before the energy giant imploded. Never mind, Hamel's ideas are always provocative. And he has maintained that stance in his latest book The Future of Management.

The hidden question Hamel is addressing is simple: do all the management text books produce smarter managers? The answer is no.

Hamel says there has been very little innovation in management thinking over the last few decades. Traditional management principles built around standardization, specialization of tasks and functions, goal alignment, hierarchy, planning and control and rewards don't work in a world where the pace of change is accelerating and more companies find themselves on the wrong side of the change curve, where deregulation and technology are reducing the barriers to entry, where companies are increasingly finding themselves enmeshed in ecosystems where they have only partial control, where profits from intellectual property are undermined by the digitization of everything not nailed down, where the Internet is shifting bargaining power from producers to consumers, where plummeting communication costs and globalization are opening up industries to hordes of new competitors and where strategy life cycles are shrinking.

"There seems to be something in modern organizations that depletes the natural resilience and creativity of human beings, something that literally leaches these qualities out of employees during daylight hours," Hamel writes." The culprit? Management principles and processes that foster discipline, punctuality, economy, rationality, and order, yet place little value on artistry, nonconformity, originality, audacity and élan. To put it simply, most companies are only fractionally human because they make room for only a fraction of the qualities and capabilities that make us human. Billions of people show up for work every day, but way too many of them are sleepwalking. The result: organizations that systematically underperform their potential."

So what are the companies showing us the future of management?

Hamel points to Whole Foods Market which has created a community of purpose. At Whole Foods, it's a mix of democracy and discipline, trust and accountability, and community combined with fierce competition. This is done by having small teams responsible for all key operating decisions, including pricing, ordering, staffing, and in-store promotion.

He also talks about WL Gore & Associates, the maker of Gore-Tex outerwear. It's built an innovation democracy. there are no management layers, there's no organizational chart, there are few titles and the concept of boss has been wiped. The hierarchy has been replaced with a lattice.

And then there is Google with its wafer-thin hierarchy, its network of lateral communications, its policy of giving outsized rewards to people who come up with outsized ideas and a team-focused approach to product development. At Google, every employee is challenged to put the user first.

Hamel argues that the Internet is the new model of management where everyone has a voice, the tools of creativity are widely distributed, it's easy and cheap to experiment, capability counts for more than credentials and titles, commitment is voluntary, power is granted from below, authority is fluent, the only hierarchies are "natural" hierarchies, communities are self-defining and individuals richly empowered with information, just about everything is decentralized, ideas compete on an equal footing, it's easy for buyers and sellers to find each other, resources are free to follow opportunities and decisions are peer-based.

Hamel argues that managers should draw lessons from five principles based on stuff that's happening right around them. Life (Experimentation beats planning and the broader the gene pool, the better things are); Markets (more dynamic than hierarchies and allow companies to foster innovation by using them to decide which ventures from staff members to pursue and which to cast aside; Democracy (Leadership is distributed and accountable to the governed and everyone has a right to dissent); Faith (What's important is the mission and people change for what they care about and in faith builds resilience; Cities (companies can model themselves on the most creative and dynamic cities where there is a real diversity of cultures, perspectives, skills, and styles that encourage innovation.