Guide to the Management Gurus [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION The Age of the Guru There is a limit to the number of original ideas in any field of human activity, and management is no exception. After ali, it is said that there are no more than half a dozen basic plots throughout the whole world of fiction and drama. Some of the most enduring themes of management were conceived centuries before commercial or industriai management was born - let alone the concept of the management guru with his or her prescriptives for performance. Machiavelli's The Prince, written at the height of Renaissance Florence, is stili a classic text on leadership and the uses of power (and inspired a popular management book of the 1960s by Antony Jay). The translator of its best-selling Penguin édition, George Bull, says The Prince's precepts are 'perfectly applicable to the actions of captains of industry or budding entrepreneurs,' citing as just one example Machiavelli's advice that when a ruler seizes a state (or a new chief executive moves into a company), he must do the hardest things first. 'The new ruler must determine ali the injuries that he will need to inflict. He must inflict them once and for all, and not have to renew them every day. In that way he will be able to set men's minds at rest, and win them over to him when he confers benefits.' Every takeover king has instinctively practised that.