Features

Book review: Management From The Masters

28 Feb 2014 by Tom Otley

Management From The MastersA useful compendium of 20 "laws" or imperatives from business leaders and management theorists, this book is excellent bedtime reading, with each chapter taking no more than ten minutes, and each succinctly summarising a useful rule or principle of business.

The author is a Fellow of the Centre For Leadership Studies at the University Of Essex, and there's a sense that it is aimed at students as practicing business people. Yet it's no worse for that.

Most of the laws will be familiar to you — Maslow's Hierarchy Of Needs, Gresham's Law, the Law Of Unintended Circumstances, but some perhaps less so. Grove's Rule (Andrew Grove, CEO, Intel) was new to me ("Only the paranoid survive") as was The Peter Rule ("Everyone rises to the level of their own incompetence").

Witzel is also good at drawing parallels between business and life in general. "Successful managers realise that there are immutable laws in the world of management that influence almost every aspect."

As his opening line has it: "Management is a complex activity. It requires us to be able to think on many different levels and about many different things, often more than one at a time.”

No wonder so few people have any aptitude for it.

The laws are divided into sections: The Laws Of The Universe (Entropy, Darwin, Yin and Yang etc…); The Laws Of Human Behaviour (Confucius's Golden Rule, Buffett's Rule" etc…); and The Laws Of Organisation ("Pareto Principle, Drucker's Rule").

Witzel says his name is not to be prescriptive — he's not saying follow all of these laws: "I merely tell you what the laws are and make you aware of the consequences; if you want to break them, it is up to you."

References are to the point without digressing into full case studies, though sometimes I wish they had (in the case of Delta Airlines, it's just two paragraphs, and seems to raise as many questions as answers, the point he is making about The Law Of Unintended Circumstances (p32).

He summarises it in a later chapter thus: "Costcutting in order to achieve greater efficiencies led to a collapse in staff morale. The evident unhappiness of the staff led in turn to declining standards of service, which in turn led customers to transfer their business elsewhere. The quest for efficiency ended, for Delta, in bankruptcy."

I think at such points the argument runs the risk of sliding from simple to simplistic.

There are good lists for further reading at the end of each chapter, including any relevant text the rule or law has been drawn from.

I admire Witzel for making the book so topical, although I wonder how long parallels with the Arab revolutionaries fighting the Assad regime will resonate. Minor quibbles — it's a good read and a great crib for managers who want to understand the rules, even if they intend breaking them.

Bloomsbury, £17.99

Tom Otley

Loading comments...

Search Flight

See a whole year of Reward Seat Availability on one page at SeatSpy.com

Business Traveller March 2024 edition
Business Traveller March 2024 edition
Be up-to-date
Magazine Subscription
To see our latest subscription offers for Business Traveller editions worldwide, click on the Subscribe & Save link below
Polls