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| W. Edwards Deming (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
This book has no ISBN, so it's not available at most retail book sites.
In the opening chapter of Management Matters: Building Enterprise Capability, author John
Hunter writes, “I believe most of what managers should know was written down
decades ago.” I take the meaning of this sentence to be, ‘there are no new management ideas or techniques.’ The
author does not, in fact, offer anything new. But, he does provide an analysis
of the ‘old’ ideas that he believes to be effective in making an enterprise,
any enterprise, more productive.
Hunter calls on the philosophies of such management
and leadership gurus as W. Edwards Deming, Russell Ackoff, and Taiichi Ohno, to
show how anyone can, with some degree of effort, turn an organization around
and make it more capable.
This is a relatively useful book for someone who wants
an introduction to management, but there are a few flaws that I feel compelled
to point out. First, the author focuses on management,
and seems to ignore the importance of effective leadership in building enterprise capability. There are several
typos in the book, and some formatting issues in the e-Book version that are a
bit distracting, but only of limited negative impact. The area that really
needs attention, though, is editing to correct grammatical errors through the
text. This sentence, for instance: “People who are not willing to learn
from the most useful management experts may
still be able to accomplish some decent things, but they are very large barriers to reaching the full potential
possible from wise management efforts.” I have bolded the areas of the sentence
that give me pause. Another example: “I
don’t have much patience for
managers not willing to learn from the experts.” The decline in proper use of
the language, brought on some believe by the proliferation of electronic media,
has inured many of us to hasty grammar, but in a book about enterprise capability,
this detracts greatly from what is otherwise a good little book.
The author says that he will be updating the book
from time to time. Even with its faults, I enjoyed reading it, and sincerely
hope some judicious editing will be his top priority for a subsequent edition.
I give this edition two of five stars for effort.
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