Review: The Management Gurus by Chris Lauer and Soundview

With a a subtitle 'Lessons from the best management books of all time' I approached this review with caution. Whilst the books summarized are indeed good (and I already have several on the shelf), I would be put off in a bookshop by such a bold claim and with which I disagree.

However, Soundview Executive Book Summaries are a well-established company who have, for many years, published paper and audio summaries of top books for busy business executives. And so I read on, and was glad that I did.

Summarizing is an art and a technique that, in my schooldays, was taught in the 'precis' form. The goal is to find the needles in the haystack of words and then present them in a coherent and readable form. And this set of summaries does this admirably well, with an initial overview and structured subsequent sections.

The value of this tome is in the ideas presented and, as you might hope from a collection of good books, they come thick and fast. Concepts are presented clearly and in a way that it is easy to adopt and adapt these for practical use.

The books summarized in this book include many famous names and reach across a range of important topics:

Title	Author	Micro-summary
Winning with People	John C Maxwell	Five questions and 25 principles for a motivated workforce.
Topgrading	Bradford D Smart	Hiring, using and keeping A-players, and so building a company of stars.
Jack Welch and the 4Es of Leadership	Jeffrey A Krames	Four keys to great leadership: Personal Energy, Energizing others, having 'Edge' and Execution.
The Leadership Challenge	Jams M Kouzes and Barry Z Posner	Five practices of exemplary leadership: modeling, visioning, challenging, enabling, encouraging.
Gods of Management	Charles Handy	Trust, bureacracy, problem-solving and individualism, and how to manage the mix.
Influencer	Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, David Maxfield, Ron McMillan and Al Switzler	Personal, social and structural methods of changing motivation and ability.
True North	Bill George with Peter Sims	Finding your 'authentic leadership' style in values, motivations and self-awareness with a sound support team and an integrated life.
What Got You Here Won't Get You There	Marshall Goldsmith	Be increasingly successful by eliminating bad habits and building effective ones.
Judgment	Noel M Tichy and Warren G Bennis	Develop good learning and decision ability around people, strategy and in crises.
Small Giants	Bo Burlingham	Why and how companies choose to be great instead of big.
Dealing With Darwin	Geoffrey A Moore	Innovation for survival, growth and product lifecycle extension.
Wikinomics	Don Tapscott and Anthony D Williams	When people collaborate they create new and very different economic dynamics, both within and between organisations.
Managing Crises Before They Happen	Ian I Mitroff with Gus Anagnos	Building a proactive crisis management system to cover economic, information, physical, people, reputation, psychopathic and natural domains.
The Leader of the Future	Frances Hesselbein, Marshall Goldsmith and Richard Beckhard	Condensed advice on leadership from many gurus, from Drucker onwards.
The Next Global Stage	Kenichi Ohmae	Strategic challenges in the cybercontinent, competition, platforms and government.

Overall, then, this is a splendid collection of extremely readable summaries of some excellent management books, and it would be hard not to recommend it wholeheartedly. I would, however, recommend reading only one summary at a time and spend a while digesting the nuggets presented before moving on to the next. You can also of course read only about those books which cover your current interests.

I can see Soundview producing an ongoing series of books like this, perhaps one per year with what might be more reasonably claimed as the best books of the year. I, for one, would be a willing subscriber!