Julian Birkinshaw’s Reinventing Management is a path-breaking book. It begins by explaining why management failed. The problems of management are not the result any single decision, or manager or industry. Rather the problems are systemic and go way back in time. The result of the failure is that managers are not respected; employees are unhappy; and there are no positive role models.

The book proposes a kind of contingency theory of management: different situations demand different kinds of management. To be effective, a manager needs to adapt to the demands of the situation. Managerial behavior is mapped on four dimensions: bureaucracy-to-emergence, hierarchy-to-collective wisdom, alignment-to-obliquity, and extrinsic-to-intrinsic motivation.

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Publication/Copyright: Forbes