Book Review: A Review of Managing in the next Millenium
Imagine the chance to have one-on-one conversations with some of the world's most imaginative and innovative management commentators, philosophers, and practitioners of today. In this fantasy, you would have the chance to get first hand Peter Drucker's insights into the management challenges of the future, or hear Michael Porter analyze the challenges of international trade. Such a fantasy is now available to readers of Mike Johnson's Managing in the next Millenium.
The back cover poses the main thesis of the book: "What will it be like to be a manager or a business leader in 2010? This is the key question answered in Managing in the next Millenium, a unique collection of candid, first-hand insights, based on "exclusive interviews with the world's top management commentators, thinkers and doers."
Sure to alienate academic purists who insist that if a Peter Drucker or a Michael Porter speaks, then each and every word must be presented in its entirety, Johnson's book is designed for managers in a hurry, who do not have time to wade through needless words to get to the meat of an issue. To create these fact-filled pages, Johnson conducted one-on-one interviews with the top theorists, faxed precise questions to others, and to broaden the scope of the book, "included extracts from keynote presentations at Management Centre Europe's three most important conferences: the International Human Resources Conference; the Global Conference on Marketing; and the Top Management Forum" (p. XIV).
This massive amount of creative and practical thinking that reflected attitudes and opinions of management leaders from all over the world, was edited, analyzed and then molded into eight extremely well-organized and easy-to-read chapters. Chapter 1, "Welcome to the New Business World" starts off with a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Bad times have a scientific value... We lear...