The Guru Guide: The Best Ideas of the Top Management Thinkers

A great way for busy business professionals to acquaint themselves with today's most important management trends

The Guru Guide is for businesspeople who need to keep abreast of the latest trends in management, but who simply don't have the time to read every book that hits the business bestseller list. Written by authors who are themselves internationally respected business authors and consultants, it provides you with concise yet penetrating discussions of the best of today's thinking on management and leadership. A quick, easy way to improve your business literacy, The Guru Guide:
* Distills and demystifies essential terms, concepts, and theories of today's top consultants and management thinkers
* Profiles more than 75 top names in management, including Warren Bennis, Stephen Covey, Peter Drucker, Michael Hammer, Peter Senge, and Margaret Wheatley
* Explores the categories of leadership, managing change, the learning organization, teamwork, strategy, managing and motivating people, and more
* Cross-links important ideas to provide a clearer picture of which issues the gurus agree on and which ones they don't
* Provides insightful commentaries along with real-world case studies
* Arms you with quick-reference charts, bulleted lists, chapter-end summaries, and other creative, quick-learning tools

"It's tough to keep up with the latest management thinking. This book can help . . . and stimulate you to go to original sources of greatest value to you." -B. Joseph White, Dean, University of Michigan Business School

You are a business professional. And like a physician, attorney, or any other type of professional, you have an important responsibility to your company, your clients, and yourself to stay on top of the latest trends in your field. But if you are like most managers today, you're too busy putting out fires and contributing to the bottom line to find the time for more than an occasional BusinessWeek or Fortune article. The fact is, even if you could spare an hour or two each day, you still wouldn't have the time to digest all of the "essential" business books and periodicals. Just to give you an idea of the scope of the problem, Amazon.com currently lists 700 "bestsellers" under the topics of management and leadership alone! Pretty daunting, but before you throw in the towel, consider this alternative-The Guru Guide.

The Guru Guide is a concise digest of the key ideas from 79 of the world's most influential management experts. It provides instant access to the best thinking on leadership, managing change, teamwork, managing and motivating people, business strategy, and other management topics of crucial importance to today's business professional.

In researching The Guru Guide, Joseph and Jimmie Boyett -widely read and respected management theorists in their own right-perused more than 200 books and 3,000 articles by Stephen Covey, Peter Senge, Tom Peters, Peter Drucker, Margaret Wheatley, Michael Hammer, Warren Bennis, Robert K. Greenleaf, and dozens of other top names in management. Out of that mountain of business wisdom, they distilled the essence of each thinker's core ideas. They cross-link the ideas in order to give you a clear picture of how thinking about critical management topics has evolved, and they provide valuable insights into the major conflicts and points of agreement among influential schools of thought. Their critical commentaries and case studies illustrate how each guru's ideas have been received and executed in the real world. And they packaged it all in a creative, easy-to-read format with quick-reference charts, bulleted lists, and chapter-end summaries of key concepts that make learning quicker and easier than ever for even the most time-starved manager.

A great way to fine-tune your business literacy, The Guru Guide is must reading for all business professionals.

JOSEPH BOYETT and JIMMIE BOYETT are cofounders and partners of Boyett & Associates, an Atlanta-based business consulting and research firm, and coauthors of the bestselling Beyond Workplace 2000: Essential Strategies for the New American Corporation.