LEADERS
The Strategies for Taking Charge
Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus
New York: Harper and Row, 1986
$19.95
RADICAL MANAGEMENT
Power Politics and the Pursuit of Trust
Samuel Culbert and John McDonough
New York: The Free Press, 1985
$17.95
PEAK PERFORMERS
The New Heroes of American Business
Charles Garfield
New York: William Morrow and Co., Inc., 1986
$16.95
Calvin Coolidge said that the business of America was business, and he could have gone on to say--if he had been a wordier person--that business was also America's sweet-heart, it sport, its life-style, and its supreme arbiter of values. Americans value production, accomplishment, and winning, and if these can't be expressed in dollars and cents we find them unconvincing. This has been, and continues to be, a great way to run a country, and it produces accomplishments, wins, and millionaires like no other sport in the world. But the game is getting tougher, and it's getting harder to win.
Long-established monuments of corporate enterprise erode as the combination of new technologies, predatory investors, and massive international competition pulls the rug from under the feet of complacent or inflexible corporate managers. The airlines struggle for existence and find their only security in a massive repudiation of existing contracts with their employees. Greyhound Lines ridership drops from 60 to 33 million in a decade, and the company sells off its terminals; Allis-Chalmers and International Harvester get out of the farm machinery business, and the farm equipment division of John Deere runs at less than half of capacity.
A management consultant in Chicago (David Merrell) warns that "Mediocrity is infiltrating American business management, and U.S. companies will lose worldwide competitiveness; the growing trend of mergers and acquisitions over the past several years threatens to breed mediocrity."
The predatory acquisitiveness of the merger maniacs means that capable managers are no longer being trained consistently in a predictable environment; that middle managers from which tomorrow's top leadership must come are decimated by both reorganization and the information technology which makes middle managers expendable; most of all, it means that the modern corporation has no long-term coherent structure, no reliable loyalties, no performance criteria except the short-term bottom line, and no common goal to harmonize the many selfish individual interests of its members.
In such a situation, perceived rightly as extremely dangerous by all of us who play the great American game and must live and work in big American organizations, there is a premium on the ability to fashion a coherent vision
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