INTRODUCTION

MANAGEMENT? THINK AGAIN

Management: is it what you think it is? And is it only about thinking?

Frederick Taylor gave us time studies a century ago; strategic planning came along a half-century later. Both have left us with the impression that management is all about thinking – systematic thinking. Well, think again, about the art and craft of managing – the seeing and the feeling and the doing, beyond the thinking and the analysing and the planning.

This is the intention of this book: to get us all thinking again, opening up perspectives on this fascinating business of management, for managers themselves, those who work with managers, and anyone who aspires to join their ranks.

We do this through all sorts of pithy and provocative pieces. Some will make you laugh, others may make you cry (for poor old management itself). Some will seem wacky, irrelevant, irreverent – good, they are meant to be unsettling, sometimes even to make you angry, so that the irrelevant becomes relevant and the irreverent can sometimes be revered. We’d like you to see and to feel and to do management as you have not before.

Alongside articles from newspapers and excerpts from books and journals, you will find quotes and poems, outbursts, letters and Web things. We have put in whatever we could find that feels interesting, provocative and above all insightful.

For convenience and coherence, we have clustered all this into chapters. These make a little sense, but you needn’t take them too seriously. Read as you wish, jump around (just as do so many managers) and skip what you care to ignore (unlike successful managers).

The first chapter is a ‘management mosaic’, meant to unfreeze you a little about what you think management is and what you think managers do – especially if you are a manager. Then we muse in Chapter 2 on the ‘management of meaning’, about how words are used and misused to represent the practice of managing.

Then it’s on to leadership. These days, how can any book about management not leap into leadership? But beware: this chapter is called ‘Misleading management’. You just might discover that leadership, too, is not what you think.

Myths abound in management, so Chapter 4 gets into these – fads, clichés, metaphors and more. Maxims, too, abound in management, so Chapter 5 presents lots of these, and what’s wrong with them – including some maxims about such maxims.

Look left or right these days and there you will likely see an MBA (or maybe just look in a mirror). So we consider these masters of managing in Chapter 6. If you happen to be the one in the mirror, cover your eyes.

We live in times of great change. Have you heard that before? Not as in Chapter 7. Called ‘Metamorphosing management’, it might just change how you think about change.

To close the book on how to carry all this positively forward, Chapter 8 suggests various ways to manage modestly. Time to think about how to take management well beyond thinking.

This is the course in advanced physics. That means the instructor finds the subject confusing. If he didn’t, the course would be called elementary physics.

Luis Alvarez, Nobel Laureate.