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Staying at the top: Mao and the art of management 

A role model, of sorts

Books on management tend to define success in the broadest possible terms—great product, happy employees, continuous improvement, gobs of profits, crushed competitors. Even when words such as “excellence” and “success” are omitted from the title, they are often implicit. A case in point is the book which many would say defined the genre, Alfred Sloan's “My Years with General Motors”, published in 1963 when GM was still an iconic company and Sloan correctly acknowledged as the architect of the well-run, decentralised, global corporation.

But focusing on how the best produce the best has its limits. Most managers, after all, do not stitch an industrial triumph from a vast bankrupt junkyard, as Sloan did. They do not delight their customer, crush competitors and create vast wealth. They struggle. They stumble.

Where is the book for them? Who can help the under-performing, over-compensated chief executive fighting to survive intrusive journalists, independent shareholders and ambitious vice-presidents who could do a better job? Where is the role model for the manager who really needs a role model most—the one who by any objective measure of performance cannot, and should not, manage at all?...

View The Economist, December 22, 2007

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(From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

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