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Hard-core Management: What You Won't Learn from the Business Gurus

By: Jo Owen
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Kogan Page Ltd
ISBN: 0749439246
ISBN-13: 9780749439248
Released: 03 May 2003
RRP: £9.99
Average Rating:

Customer Reviews

Highly Recommended! - By: Rolf Dobelli, 19 May 2004
This blunt, irreverent book blurts out what many people in business have long suspected: nearly everything you learned in business school is wrong & most of what you read in corporate mission statements & strategic plans makes no sense. Author Jo Owen takes on alll of the shibboleths of yesteryear's management literature - romance your customer, communicate, invite change & so on - & demolishes each one. The approach is raw & blatant; it stands in relation to ordinary business books much as punk rock stands in relation to easy listening. The author seems to be saying something no one else has dared to say. But do not confuse the novelty of the presentation with the novelty of the material itself. To some extent, Owen's recommendations revise the conventional wisdom of the recent bubble years & replace it with a new & - if not more sober - certainly less effervescent orthodoxy. We recommend taking a thoughtful look. What people are starting to say more & more often, Jo Owen has perhaps expressed with the most originality.
Post modern management manual - By: , 11 Jun 2003
This is a great read.

However there were moments when Owen's observations made me feel like throwing in my management towel. As he points out, most of us operate in a deluded state of believing that we know where we are going & how we are getting there.

Today that belief doesn’t seem to be getting us very far. Owen's solutions are brilliant in their simplicity & conviction: listening, reading & seeing in order to understand rather than show off...searching for the local as opposed to universal truth....

As he says, we are prisoners of the past & prisoners of our ignorance. For instance we pretend to understand technology on the basis of being able to operate mobile phones & laptops – but in reality few of us know much and, rather than admit that, we skate over technical decisions which are key to our companies’ futures.

The need for clarity & simplicity is another central message of Owen’s book which is delivered in a clear & amusing style. It should be read by anyone serious about breaking through the hackneyed jargon of business management & towards an entirely new approach. Out of alll the management books I have read it is the only once that comes up with a convincing model for leadership & success in the twenty first century.

Joseph Cohen