Ultimate Book of Business Gurus

Follow that starThe ultimate business guru book, by Stuart CrainerManagement came of age in 1954, with super guru Peter Drucker's book, `the practice of management'. Since then it has made up for lost time, and as Stuart Crainer writes, we have all become managers, whether we manage hospitals, schools, funeral parlours, farms or football teams. Management has become "the art and science of our times, and management thinkers have become its high priests, the guru's".Despite this, there is still no one ultimate truth. Theories mushroom, each one promising more than its predecessor. The growth is fed by aspirant managers "seeking recipes for success and ideas that can distinguish them from the crowd." Many managers occupy their time "inflicting ill-advised ideas on their organisation."Yet most organisations are being run the way they were when Drucker began to study them. "We have a lot of new tools" says Drucker", but not very many ideas." The resulting cynicism, we learn, has made Dilbert the best selling business book of all time. As, Dilbert himself puts it, "re-engineering was invented by Dr Jonas Salk as a cure for Quality Programmes".This is not to write off the guru mega-industry. Nor can it relieve us of the pressure to keep abreast of the latest fashion. As Crainer points out in his introduction, "if your son or daughter discovers you have not heard of the latest pop sensation, they are incredulous. ... Managers behave similarly when they discover a colleague, who knows nothing of the latest addition to the management vocabulary." The only thing worse that slavishly following management theory, is ignoring it completely.In his ultimate business Guru book, Crainer summarises one hundred (fifty in my soft back edition) of the most significant contributors to the management literature. As befitting a young discipline, he has spread his net appropriately wide. Thus we find academics such as Michael Porter, Philip Kotler, Edgar Schein and Douglas McGregor whose theories are studied in business school. We find executives such as Henry Ford, Alfred Sloan, Harold Geneen, and Thomas Watson Junior who, through practice and theory, put their stamp firmly onto the corporate world. And we find the consultants Marvin Bower, Tom Peters, Bruce Henderson and James Champy, who produce "the best ideas", while in the corporate equivalent of a research laboratory.Also appropriate is the wide spectrum of belief. Arch conservatives such as Frederick Taylor and Igor Ansoff are included, along with the liberal left such as Peter Senge, and Frons Trompenaars. We find Charles Handy "who has an unerring tendency to state the obvious", but also with Richard Pascale, who tackles the tension of real life contradictions, head on.Each guru is introduced with a quote, their breakthrough ideas in key words and their most important book. This is followed by three to five pages discussing their contribution and putting it into the contex