The Handy Guide to the Gurus of Management
Programme One - Introduction
© BBC English/Charles Handy
INTRODUCTION:
In the days of global capitalism has management become some sort of religion? Who are the gurus anyway, and what do they preach? How uful have they proved to be in the past and how much notice should we take of their ideas?
The are the questions that I shall be trying to answer in the twelve short talks in this, my personal guide to the gurus of management.考研时间安排表
Each talk will concentrate on just one of the gurus, so I have had to lect the twelve writers, academics and business professionals that I think have been the most influential. But in this first talk I’ll be discussing gurus in general and why I think they matter, as well as telling you a bit about mylf and my ideas. It is, perhaps, a bit cheeky to include mylf in the list of the twelve gurus, but you need to know the sort of things that matter to me if you are going to make n of the rest of the ries.
Back to the beginning, however, and the ri of the gurus. No-one knows how it happened, but twenty or so years ago the leading thinkers in the field of management started to be called 'gurus' by their publics. Some suggested that, actually, witch doctors would be a better title, becau there was often no scientific basis for their ideas. To others the gurus were a sign
deepoceanthat management was an art more than a discipline or even a rious profession. A book called 'The One Minute Manager' sold in its millions. You can't imagine something like 'The One Minute Doctor' having a market at all.
Nonetheless, management has always been the invisible ingredient of success. The pyramids of Egypt and the Great Wall of China could not have been built without good management systems. The great military campaigns of history owed as much
圣诞老人英文to good management as to bravery or weapons. Great ideas lie wasted unless someone turns them into a viable activity, or into a business, by management. Economies shrivel and countries decay unless they are properly managed.
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How strange, then, that management has always had such a bad press. The word itlf is demeaning. In everyday usage when we say to someone 'did you manage all right today?' we mean
'did you cope?' not 'did you do all the things that the management books tell you to do, …. to Plan, Organize, Staff, Direct, Co-ordinate, Report and Budget?'.
If you think about it, no-one likes to be managed. It sounds a bit like being manipulated or controlled. The older professions like medicine, law and education tactfully do not u the word “Manager”. They prefer softer words like President, Principal or Partner, or even Permanent Secretary as the titles in their hierarchies.
During the last hundred years managers have tried to make their activity more respectable by professionalising it. At the beginning
of the last century Business Schools sprang up first in America, then, much later, in Europe and Asia. Now practically every city in the world has a School or Institute of Management and if you want a good start to an executive career, then get yourlf an MBA degree and become a Master of Business Administration.
Irritatingly, however, the crets of management remain elusive. Unlike the physical sciences there em to be no hard and fast laws. If there were we would all be rich. As it is, the ground keeps shifting beneath our feet as new technologies arrive and people find new needs or wants which man
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agement has to deal with. Just to make it more complicated, the rearch laboratories of management are not tucked away in universities, but are made up of all the business and other organizations out there in the real world, experimenting, adapting; ducking and weaving to stay alive.
That's where the gurus come in. Their role is to interpret and spread around what ems to be working. They are the honey-bees of management, buzzing around the world, writing, preaching, consulting. Oddly, perhaps, you won't always find their books on the reading lists of academic management cours. That's becau their books are meant to be read by busy people, not by diligent students. Their lectures have to be exciting, even inspiring, their ideas both memorable and immediately relevant, not least to justify the fees they charge. The faster the world changes the more necessary are the bees, carrying ideas from one place to another, codifying and reformulating as they go.
In this ries I shall be discussing the twelve most significant of the gurus, suggesting why, in my view, their ideas matter and why they make a difference to the way we manage our organizations. In hindsight, most of management ems to be just commonn. The trick is to glimp the n before it becomes common. That is what gives you the competitive edge. That is what moves the world along, and that's what the gurus are trying to do.fact
So who is in my list of the twelve gurus most of whom I know personally or professionally? It has to include Peter Drucker, now in his nineties but still explaining the world in inimitable pro and a guttural Austrian accent. In fact, mention any management idea that works and the betting is that Peter Drucker was writing about it before you were born. The “knowledge worker” was his idea; and he invented the notion of “management by objectives.”There will also be Tom Peters who book, 'In Search Of Excellence', which he wrote in1982 with Robert Waterman, made history when it became the first management book to reach the national best-ller lists in America. There will be Kenichi Omae, the Japane strategist who, amongst other things, talks about the impact of globalization on nations; and Sumantra Goshal, now Dean of Hyderabad's new Business School, who was one of the first to herald the arrival of truly global organizations. For cross-cultural issues we turn to Fons Trompenaars from the Netherlands. And, of cour, there’s me , an Irishman masquerading as an Englishman, with my ideas on organizations and culture and my socio-philosophical interest in people.An international cast for what is increasingly the major international challenge - management in a turbulent world.
So much by way of introduction.
ooc什么意思To tho of you who have just tuned in, I'm Charles Handy and you’re listening to the Handy Guide tchiefly
o the Gurus of Management, from the BBC World Service. There will be twelve gurus in all but, as I said earlier, I am going to begin with mylf and my ideas. That's so that you can get to know me and my prejudices, my way of looking at the world, even the way I talk.直到天亮
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