The Management Gurus

July 15, 2008
Soundview publishes condensed versions of selected notable business books and sends them out to subscribers. This collection of some of its summaries follows "The Marketing Gurus" collection. Lauer, a senior editor at Soundview, joins with other Soundview staff to offer 14 summarized works on management by recent prominent writers in the field. Each summary is a distillation of approximately 5000 words. The summaries, all of recent books or updated editions, making them relatively fresh in a fluid field, cover a range of current topics (e.g., topgrading and wikinomics) and are by lead authors (e.g., Ken Blanchard, Peter Drucker), but there's little structure and few connections between the offerings. Each summary is preceded by a "summary in brief," spelling out in four paragraphs what will be covered in the full summary, adding an irritating layer of repetition. The summaries are competently done and might be useful as refreshers, but reading boiled-down versions of even the most potent ideas is, at best, uninteresting, making one feel like a student taking shortcuts. This book never makes a real case for its own existence: it does not analyze the books covered or build upon their arguments. Libraries would be better served by acquiring the original books instead.Brian Walton, Tampa-Hillsborough P.L., FL

Copyright 2008 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.