Augustine's Laws

The author of this irreverent guide to business management offers fifty-two rules embedded in a droll text whose contrapuntal humor brings into sharp focus all the dilemmas a manager might face

Drawing on his experience as an aeronautical engineer in industry and for the Pentagon, Augustine, vice-president of Martin Marietta Corp., formulates 52 "laws" designed to avoid or correct bad management practices. In this expanded version of a book originally published by a technical press, his rueful comments and facetiously didactic style, interspersed with numerous examples, quotes, aphorisms and adages, overlay much common sense and shrewd judgment. He is appalled at the inexorable rise in production costs and schedule delays, many of them caused by faulty government cost evaluation and contract-letting systems, and distressed by top-heavy administrations and over-reliance on technology. Among his targets are MBA programs, a surfeit of lawyers and experts of all kinds, along with lengthy maintenance manuals, and unnecessary committees and meetings. Rules and regulations, he concludes, cannot replace management competence. Photos.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Augustine, executive vice-president of Martin Marietta, has put together a book made up of three parts that seem to bear no relation to each other, yet are forced into an unlikely union: a sort of running commentary on the fortunes of the Daedalus Model Airplane Company; 52 "laws" formulated by Augustine and intended to explain everything from advertising to saving money; and an enormous array of observations, quotations, charts, anecdotes, and bits of information on a baffling number of topics. While this book is obviously the fruit of immense industry, it is scrappy and diffusethe material for a good book rather than a finished work. A. J. Anderson, Graduate Sch. of Library & Information Science, Simmons Coll., Boston
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.