Guide to Management Ideas and Gurus

by Tim Hindle

Rare book

Genres: Business, Management, Nonfiction, Audiobook

322 pages, Hardcover

First published July 31, 2008

Reviews

[Riku Sayuj · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is designed to lead the interested reader on to further learning through the reading lists that are attached to many of the entries. The author says that the original aim was to compile the 100 greatest management ideas and the 100 greatest gurus of the 20th century, an average of one big thought and one big thinker per year. Would have been a great idea. Obviously, that didn’t happen.

Hindle makes an interesting demarkation to help classify the thinkers:

1. The idea that management is a science — represented most notably by F.W. Taylor’s ideas about “scientific management”
2. The idea that management is an art — represented most memorably perhaps by Douglas McGregor’s Theory Y.

This divide can be said to account for the two main disciplines that management gurus come from:

1. Social science — represented by Elton Mayo, McGregor, Abraham Maslow and Elliott Jaques; and
2. Engineering — represented by Taylor, Michael Porter, Michael Hammer and Taiichi Ohno.

I thought this was a nice and informative way to organize the book and also very useful to keep in mind while reading management text books. It was the best part of the book.

[Paul W · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Economist’s Management Ideas and Gurus provides a pithy, two-page summary of ideas that have influenced management practices over decades and the gurus who have contributed or shaped them.

Hindle provides an insightful summary, and at times a mild critique, of the people and the ideas which are the foundation of many MBA programs. While obviously too short to bring any academic rigour to its analysis, this Guide from the Economist is a useful aide mémoire for an MBA student or person with an interest in management practices.

[Nanda Kumar · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book provides a brief about the major Management Ideas and the influential Management gurus. The briefs are unbiased and provides basic details aspiring readers to read further about the ideas and gurus from the business literature and works.

This is the best line according to me by the author, where he writes a sentence about the influence of epidemiology in business "A lot of the language owes to its spread to the influence of the internet, where viruses are common and where dormant information can sometimes erupt suddenly and infect us all"

[Johannes · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book provides a comprehensive overwview of some business ideas and and management thinkers of the last two centuries. It's organized as short two-page snippets of the each idea or thinker and thus can only provide a very brief introduction to the subjects.

Probably a good book for someone with a non-business/economics background, but for the business majors it might just be too boring.

[MU · Rating 5 out of 5]

Concise and informative.