Businesses, today, are functioning in a highly intensified competitive environment, which calls for innovative solutions such that the problems are foreseen and solutions are visualized and planned in advance. This requires a change in the objective of a business unit besides identifying and adopting the successful lessons from peers and self- experimentations. This article presents some of the important trends which are adopted by successful companies in managing their business.

Today, "Men may come and men may go, but organizations go on forever" is the new adage that rules the functioning of the world's best organizations. The retirement of Bill Gates as the Chief Software Architect of Microsoft and the responsibility taken up by Steve Ballmer in replacing him in managing the world's number one organization is the case in point. This adage insists the need for establishing and running business houses in a systematic way. In other words, organizations need to operate as systems where we do not have any room for human error. This calls for a dramatic change in the way in which we see and deal with the discipline of management. Nowadays, things are happening in nano seconds which is actually forcing business tycoons to adopt predictive management in such a way that performance gaps are foreseen and remedial actions for such deviations are visualized and planned in advance. Businesses in the current scenario are like patients in the ICU ward of a hospital, because every second determines the fate of such a patient/business unit. Businesses today are run on a `now or never' basis. This illustrates the need for grasping the time value of management and, thereby, prioritizing the activities with the help of a foolproof planning exercise.

This requires a new way of managing where the goals are clearly defined along with the step by step procedures that are to be adopted in the realization of the defined objective. Dave Ulrich, Professor of Business, Michigan University, states that companies are no longer required to measure their performance in terms of metrics which are tangible in nature—in terms of profits and Return on Investments(RoI). According to him, the need of the hour is to understand and support activities that create sustainable capability and external shareholder value.

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