Charles Handy’s choice of management gurus

The Handy Guide to the Gurus of Management is a series that examines the roles and teachings of Business Gurus, with text, audio and an explanation of common management terms, his guide and selection of management gurus are as follows:

• Introduction – Charles Handy guides you through the lives and works of his choice of management gurus.
• Charles Handy – Charles Handy was, for many years, a professor at the London Business School. He is now an independent writer and broadcaster. He describes himself, these days, as a social philosopher.
• Peter Drucker – Peter Drucker is thought of around the world as the seminal thinker, writer, and lecturer on the contemporary organization.
• Tom Peters – Tom Peters is not a philosopher or a social historian like Peter Drucker. He no longer has any all-embracing theories of the world of organisations nor any formulas for change but he gets under the skin of an organisation.
• Warren Bennis – Warren Bennis has devoted most of his life to the study of leaders of every description.
• Sumantra Ghoshal – For his popularity and influence among the leaders of business, The Economist magazine recently named Ghoshal as one of the Eurogurus.
• Kenichi Ohmae – Kenichi Ohmae made his mark twenty years ago with his book on corporate strategy. It is still a collection of good sense and clear advice, even though some of the examples may now seem a bit dated.
• Gary Hamel – In their book, “Competing for the Future”, which came out in 1995. Hamel and Prahalad start off by pointing out that you can improve your results in two ways: by cutting your costs, or by increasing your outputs.
• Rosabeth Moss Kanter – Rosabeth goes into leading-edge corporations, learns from them and then serves up what she’s learnt in nicely digestible messages for the rest of us.
• Bill Gates – Bill Gates is an outstanding example of another sort of guru, the guru who preaches more by deeds than by words. He revels in change and draws inspiration from a crisis.
• Ricardo Semler – Ricardo Semler, author and business manager, is celebrated as a role model of a Chief Executive who breaks all the traditional rules and succeeds, massively.
• Michael Porter – Porter suggested that one of the strategies managers can choose from to gain competitive advantage is to offer something special or different which would allow you to command a premium price.
• Fons Trompenaar and Charles Hampden Turner – For twenty years these two academics, a cross-cultural Anglo-Dutch partnership, have been interviewing managers around the world, giving them questionnaires to answer, conducting seminars and advising their companies.

I think that this is a great collection of management gurus and their ideas, well worth reading.
Technorati Tags: Leadership, Management, Business, Change, Strategy, Guru

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Tagged as: Management, Role Models