Maze of management - literature
THIS is one statistic nobody follows and yet it is mind-boggling. In some ways, it reminds you of the rotting apples of a bumper crop.
Management literature multiplies every half an hour by a new book and this count ignores non-English titles. But if every book tells a story, it is not necessarily a new one, especially in the domain of management literature. Writing a book is a sure way to get noticed. And for some, a sure way to be forgotten.
I looked at the discount sale counter of Barnes & Noble the other day and found to my shock that more than half the titles were written in 2010! The market punishes the mediocre - and even the good.
With such a high obsolescence rate at stake, why then are people motivated to write? What prompted Al Gore to write, for example? - even if his was strictly not about management but on another fancied field, the future of mankind.
Publishers and the news media that hound the rulers and politicians, switch loyalties the moment they are out of office. These superannuated folk then become their best friends and are courted to tell their tales in print.
All this in an era when the old fashioned book reading has fallen down the scale to a third or fourth order of interest, after Internet surfing, television of course, iPad, iPod and other such pursuits. The young crowds at Apple centres outnumber those in libraries by a factor of 50 or 100. Why would one still be motivated to write? And that too on the theme of management that clearly seems to be oversupplied. As someone observed: You don't become an ace skier by reading about it.
So, do you still become a good manager or better still, a corporate leader, by reading about it while munching chips by the pool on Sunday afternoons?
The writers and the publishers are not interested in this argument. The management drugstore doles out books on leadership, strategy, innovation, competing, global business etc as the generic panacea drugs for the afflicted.
I was once crazy for these management books, especially those with catchy titles: Eight Smart Ways or 66 Things You Need or 81 Challenges Smart Managers face - (perhaps the sequel will be 81 challenges that less smart managers don't face?) and so on.
The other category that attracted me was books by well-known professors - a silent admission of a questionable notion that professors tend to introspect and can theorize better. That brings me to the crucial question. Do we attempt to put into practice good theories or does it make more sense to theorise good practices?
The writers do not know either – otherwise you will not have titles like First break all the rules by Gallup's Markus Buckingham and Curt Coffman.
They all seem to go to the same "titling" consultant - how else do you explain the plethora of mind-numbing phrases such as "The A-Z" of all everything.
Then there are The Little Black Book of project management by Michael Thomsett, for instance and The Big Book of leadership games by Vasudha Deming, for instance and the ever popular, The Complete Idiot's Guide To . . . (I thought idiots remain so because they are unguidable). Are such books meant as guideposts for practitioners? Every celebrated book, barring really a few, lives a dog's life - literally lasting at best a decade, before being found ill-conceptualised or out of vogue or being branded as plain nonsense.
Even the business celebrities around whom such books are written would perhaps consider it a bad omen to be idolized in print - Percy Barnevik of ABB and Kenneth Lay of Enron would have told you.
It is clear as to who writes such books - anybody who can string a sentence. But who really are the buyers of these books? Students looking for intellectual stimulation? Fellow writers who could either be genuinely interested in the subject or could be hoping to decry the contents? Libraries who have to fulfil their fund allocations? Managers who think they are poorly off without a book in hand? Casual readers who feed on letters and words? Managers whose styles have run their company aground? Greedy investors? (This is how Dads get classified as Rich or Poor!) Or those who are book-fashion conscious? Or those who simply fancy reading them (or even merely possessing them)? Bestseller rankings do not seem to have moderated the publishing frenzy, which has no parallel other than Hollywood, But then, this too seems to be a form of entertainment. Will the day come when the buyers are outnumbered by the authors?