50 Books Challenge: Book #5: Management Stripped Bare by Jo Owen

The 50 Books Challenge is an internet challenge. The challenge simply put is to finish reading 50 books in a year or roughly 1 book per week and so far, I’m lagging behind….

The book should have been called “Management, the Reality Show” for it’s candid depiction of real life management. In fact, it’s not even written or read like a book but more like an advice column. It has that undeniable British witticism written into it and the tone is also unmistakably cynical especially towards management theories and top management. The book definitely belongs to the Behavioral School of Management (see Mintzberg 10 schools of management) and eschew towards office /organizational politics. Nevertheless, the author does offer valuable insights into management and on occasion provided some pretty interesting theories and frameworks (such as Chaos Pricing Theory). All of this make this book a must read for management practitioner. Highly recommended. One downside of the book if one can call it a downside is that the book is structured like a dictionary with each topic arranged in alphabetical order with the longest topic span like 3 pages and 5 or 6 paragraphs while the shortest topic has only something like 10 words maybe less. The problem with this kind of structure is that the topics changed abruptly and there is an absence of a smooth flow of thinking precisely because of the sudden changes. However, the upside of this structure is that one can easily look up the topic just like an encyclopedia or a dictionary.