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Management
To be both timely and timeless is a neat trick – one that is accomplished by all the books summarized in this volume.
Leadership
Complexity
People
Customers
Not so long ago IBM celebrated “The Year of the Customer.” One wonders what the company celebrated in other years – “The Year of the Monkey,” perhaps. While Adam Smith laid the philosophical foundations for the market economy, Professors Kotler and Levitt have helped thousands of companies become truly market-facing.
Global
IBM, Shell, Unilever and Nestlé have long thought of themselves as citizens of the world. By the way, one of the things it means to be global is to be willing and able to learn from different management cultures.
The Future
As William Gibson, the author of Neuromancer, so aptly put it, “The future’s already happened, it’s just unequally distributed.” So here’s a piece of advice, if you want to see the future coming, look where others aren’t. If you want proof that a wide angle lens can help you get to the future first, you’ll find it in the pages of.
Renewal
Now, I don’t think anyone out there has a crystal ball If God reveals the future to anyone, it’s not to the chairmen/women of Fortune 500 companies. Drucker, Handy and Toffler have each, in their own time, pointed our attention to an inflection point that distinguishes the future from the past.
Competition
Competition is as old as humankind itself – from the first fist that was thrown over a property dispute, to sophisticated battles over patent rights. Of course the goal of competition is always the same – to occupy the high ground, be it battlements on a hill, or the operating system for the personal computer.
Efficiency
Strategy
Manager asks Dogbert, the consultant, “So just what is our core competence?” “You’ll be pleased to know that your core competence is paying money to consultants,” Dogbert replies nonchalantly. At the rate of a book a week you could plow through this list and still have a Christmas holiday.
PREFACE
Rosabeth Moss Kanter plows a lonely furrow as the leading female managerial thinker of our time. But the fifty books celebrated in The Ultimate Business Library have unquestionably had profound effects on managers and organizations throughout the world.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Musings on management’ by Henry Mintzberg, Harvard Business Review, July–August Copyright the President and Fellows of Harvard College; all rights reserved. Beyond Theory Y’ by John Morse and Jay Lorsch, Harvard Business Review, May–June Copyright the President and Fellows of Harvard College; all rights reserved.
INTRODUCTION
Look at the wave of enthusiasm for reengineering which dominated the business book market at the beginning of the 1990s. Prior to publication Peters and Waterman actually distributed 15,000 photocopies of the book to interested parties.
The New Knowledge Imperative
In the past, the quest for knowledge – new tools, techniques and ideas – was part of the process of professionalization. Rodney Turner of the UK’s Henley Management College believes there is a range of responses to what the management thinkers say.
Notes
FIFTY BOOKS WHICH MADE MANAGEMENT
MANAGERIAL PRE-HISTORY
THE THIRTIES
THE FORTIES
THE FIFTIES
THE SIXTIES
THE SEVENTIES
THE EIGHTIES
THE NINETIES
IGOR ANSOFF
Ansoff has explained its genesis (Ansoff, 1994): ‘Corporate Strategy integrated strategic planning concepts which were invented independently in a number of leading American firms, including Lockheed. Corporate Strategy is also notable for its introduction of the word ‘synergy’ to the management vocabulary.
Chris Argyris & Donald Schon
This is most apparent in the upsurge of interest in the concept of the learning organization. If you wished to trace the roots of the learning organization you would invariably find yourself reading Argyris and Schon’s Organizational Learning.
CHESTER BARNARD
Chester Barnard (1886–1961)
Indeed, there are many messages in The Functions of the Executive which resonate with contemporary management thinking. Part of his responsibility must be to nurture the values and goals of the organization.
SUMANTRA GHOSHAL
CHRISTOPHER BARTLETT &
Bartlett and Ghoshal observe – and celebrate – the demise of the multi-divisional form championed by Alfred P. With these differing organizational forms available, Bartlett and Ghoshal argue that companies should do whatever makes sense for their business rather than following the organizational models of the past with the two extremes of centralization and decentralization.
MEREDITH BELBIN
Meredith Belbin
Corporations have been preoccupied with the qualifications, experience and achievement of individuals; they have applied themselves to the selection, development, training, motivation, and promotion of individuals; they have discussed and debated the strengths and weaknesses of individuals; and yet all of us know in our hearts that the ideal individual for a given job cannot be found. Members engaging in the exercise were asked, voluntarily and confidentially, to undertake a personality and critical-thinking test.
Warren Bennis & Burt Nanus
Indeed, he uses a definition of leadership as: ‘The capacity to create a compelling vision and translate it into action and sustain it.’ Successful leaders have a vision that other people believe in and treat as their own. The third aspect of leadership identified by Bennis is trust which he describes as ‘the emotional glue that binds followers and leaders together’.
James MacGregor Burns
To Burns, leadership is not the preserve of the few or the tyranny of the masses. Only the inert, the alienated, and the powerless are unengaged.’ To Burns, leadership is intrinsically linked to morality and ‘moral leadership emerges from, and always returns to, the fundamental wants and needs, aspirations, and values of the followers’.
DALE CARNEGIE
Dale Carnegie
Peters and Waterman’s celebration of customer service owes something to Carnegie’s advice on ‘the big secret of dealing with people’. Carnegie’s message remains relevant: people matter and, in the world of business, how you manage and relate to people is the key to success.
James Champy &
Michael Hammer
Champy and Hammer say that reengineering is concerned with ‘rejecting conventional wisdom and received assumptions of the past. In his review of the book in the Financial Times, Christopher Lorenz (1993) noted: ‘They [Champy and Hammer] are.
ALFRED CHANDLER
Alfred Chandler
EDWARDS DEMING
Deming, ‘do you think they’re standing still?’ No senior executive ever sat through one of Dr. Deming’s ‘the rot starts at the top’ harangues without coming away just a little bit more humble and contrite – a good start on the road to total quality.”.
Edwards Deming (1900–1993)
Quality, in Deming’s eyes, is not the preserve of the few but the responsibility of all. Even so, there is no questioning the enormous effect Deming’s thinking has had – both in Japan and now in the West.
PETER F. DRUCKER
Peter Drucker
With its examinations of GM, Ford and others, Drucker’s audience and world view in The Practice of Management is resolutely that of the large corporation. In the years since its publication, the reputation of The Age of Discontinuity has steadily increased.
HENRI FAYOL
Henri Fayol (1841–1925)
Fayol’s system was based on acceptance of and adherence to different functions (and was later influential on Alfred P. Sloan at General Motors). Brech (1953) notes: ‘The importance of Fayol’s contribution lay in two features: the first was his systematic analysis of the process of management; the second, his form advocacy of the principle that management can, and should, be taught.
MARY PARKER FOLLETT
Mary Parker Follett (1868–1933)
During her life, Mary Parker Follett’s thinking on management was generally ignored – though in Japan there was a great deal of interest in her perspectives. There is often the possibility of something better than either of two given alternatives,’ Follett writes.
HENRY FORD
Henry Ford (1863–1947)
Ford’s business thinking is simply expressed: ‘Our policy is to reduce the price, extend the operations, and improve the article,’ he writes. Ford’s lack of faith in management proved the undoing of the huge corporate empire he assembled.
MICHAEL GOOLD, MARCUS ALEXANDER &
ANDREW CAMPBELL
Michael Goold, Andrew Campbell &
Marcus Alexander
If corporate level strategy is to add value, Goold, Campbell and Alexander suggest that there needs to be a tight fit between the parent organization and its businesses. Given this added complexity, the ability of the parent to intervene on a limited number of issues is crucial.
Note
Hamel and Prahalad define core competencies as ‘the collective learning in the organization, especially how to coordinate diverse production skills and integrate multiple streams of technologies’ and call on organizations to see themselves as a portfolio of core competencies as opposed to business units. While such questions remain largely unanswered, Hamel and Prahalad are moving on to pose yet more: ‘Something new needed to be said about the content of strategy.
CHARLES HANDY
Charles Handy
First, what he calls ‘the shamrock organization’ – ‘a form of. organization based around a core of essential executives and workers supported by outside contractors and part-time help’. Explains Handy: ‘The wise organization already knows that their smart people are not to be easily defined as workers or as managers but as individuals, as specialist, as professional or executives, or as leader (the older terms of manager and worker are dropping out of use), and that they and it need also to be obsessed with the pursuit of learning if they are going to keep up with the pace of change.’.
FREDERICK HERZBERG
Frederick Herzberg
In The Motivation to Work, Herzberg and his co-authors write: ‘Hygiene operates to remove health hazards from the environment of man. In effect, they can select the elements which they recognize as providing their own motivation to work.
JOSEPH M. JURAN
Joseph M. Juran
Juran’s quality philosophy, laid out in Planning for Quality and his other books, is built around a quality trilogy: quality planning, quality management and quality implementation. If quality is so elemental and elementary why had it become ignored in the West.
ROSABETH MOSS KANTER
Rosabeth Moss Kanter
American woes are firmly placed at the door of ‘the quiet suffocation of the entrepreneurial spirit in segmentalist companies’. People are put at center stage – ‘The degree to which the opportunity to use power effectively is granted to or withheld from individuals is one operative difference between those companies which stagnate and those which innovate’.
PHILIP KOTLER
Philip Kotler
Marketers must know when to cultivate large markets and when to niche; when to launch new brands and when to extend existing brand names; when to push products through distribution and when to pull them through distribution; when to protect the domestic market and when to penetrate aggressively into foreign markets; when to add more benefits to the offer and when to reduce the price; and when to expand and when to contract their budgets for salesforce, advertising, and other marketing tools.’ The scope of marketing is expanding exponentially as is demonstrated by the size and scope of Marketing Management – its contents range from industry and competitor analysis to designing strategies for the global marketplace, from managing product life cycle strategies to retailing, wholesaling and physical distribution systems. For the aspiring or practicing marketer, the attraction of Marketing Management lies in the clarity of its definitions of key phrases and roles.
TED LEVITT
Ted Levitt
In ‘Marketing myopia’ Levitt argues that the central preoccupation of corporations should be with satisfying customers rather than simply producing goods. In ‘Marketing myopia’ Levitt also makes a telling distinction between the tasks of selling and marketing.
NICOLO MACHIAVELLI
Nicolo Machiavelli (1469–1527)
It is unnecessary for a prince to have all the good qualities I have enumerated, but it is very necessary to appear to have them,’ Machiavelli advises, adding the suggestion that it is useful ‘to be a great pretender and dissembler’. It is all very well being good, says Machiavelli, but the leader ‘should know how to enter into evil when necessity commands’.
Douglas McGregor (1906–64)
McGregor described the assumptions behind Theory Y: ‘(1) that the expenditure of physical and mental effort in work is as natural as in play or rest – the typical human doesn’t inherently dislike work; (2) external control and threat of punishment are not the only means for bringing about effort toward a company’s ends; (3) commitment to objectives is a function of the rewards associated with their achievement – the most important of such rewards is the satisfaction of ego and can be the direct product of effort directed toward an organization’s purposes; (4) the average human being learns, under the right conditions, not only to accept but to seek responsibility; and (5) the capacity to exercise a relatively high degree of imagination, ingenuity, and creativity in the solution of organizational problems is widely, not narrowly, distributed in the population.’. In another development from McGregor’s original argument, John Morse and Jay Lorsch(l 970) argued that ‘the appropriate pattern of organization is contingent on the nature of the work to be done and the particular needs of the people involved’.
ABRAHAM MASLOW
Abraham Maslow (1908–1970)
Motivation and Personality is best known for its ‘hierarchy of needs’–. a concept which was first published by Maslow in 1943. Even so, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs contributed to the emergence of human relations as a discipline and to a sea- change in how motivation was perceived.
HENRY MINTZBERG
Henry Mintzberg
If the system does the thinking,’ he writes, ‘the thought must be detached from the action, strategy from operations, (and) ostensible thinkers from doers. They may be difficult to “analyze”, but they are indispensable for synthesis – the key to strategy making.’.