"In the society of knowledge the research is not an institutional luxury, nor something that can be entrusted only to specific agencies or Departments specialized. The essence of the industry itself is no longer production, but scientific and technological inquiry." This was one of the main ideas that Alejandro Llano, Full Professor of the University of Navarra, conveyed to the more than 600 alumni members of the IESE of the University of Navarra who are celebrating their XXXIX Assembly this weekend in Amsterdam under the title degree scroll "New era. New paradigms.

The program of this meeting in the Dutch capital also included speeches by Lucio Stanca, president of IBM Europe; Lionel Barber, director of the European edition of the Financial Times; and Cor Boonstra, president of Philips, among others.

"Today, not only industry, every business of goods or services - also education - is constitutively research-based," he said. "There is no longer a strict distinction between management and research, because the management function itself consists of getting everyone in the organization to think about what they do, to do it in a new and better way."

The philosopher Llano emphasized the idea that today's companies must be "intellectual organizations", that is, "communities capable of learning more, of always learning anew. Only organizations capable of acting in a corporately intelligent manner will be able to navigate in the space of knowledge opened up by the new Economics. The destiny of those that fail to do so will be museums of industrial or bureaucratic archeology".

"The ability to get to know new things and learn how to do them is what gives the competitiveness index of a business in the new Economics" he stressed. "An intelligent corporation is capable of continuously learning new knowledge, a potential that cannot be restricted to a few specialists or to an innovation department , but must permeate the business from top to bottom and extend to the whole of society".

End the distinction between work management and operations.

According to Full Professor of the University of Navarra, "the important thing is not to teach, the important thing is to learn, which is equivalent to saying that management or governance is ordered to work, and not the other way around. Because the only purpose of teaching is learning, just as the only goal of management is to improve the quality of work. This is the current meaning of leadership".

"Being a leader today is equivalent to making a recognized knowledge operative in the corresponding community," he commented. "But since no manager can or should know everything about the operations of his corporation, the exercise of his leadership consists of teaching others to learn, in establishing the conditions of possibility for his collaborators (no longer subordinates) to learn what they need to know. So the boundaries between work management and work operations are blurred".

At final ," he said, "as has been the case at IESE for years, work management and work operations are not at odds with each other, and they are becoming less and less distinct from each other. Because everyone manages at their own level, and no manager is exempt from carrying out the most difficult and delicate tasks, precisely those that should not be delegated.