Managing from A to Z

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G is for geese
Forget the eagle. Yes, Donald H. Weiss knows that entrepreneurs like to imagine themselves as spiritual kin to the Great Bald: independent, fierce, soaring. But greatness "doesn't come to people perched in an aerie high above the world they seek to conquer," argues Weiss in Secrets of the Wild Goose: The Self-Management Way to Increase Your Personal Power and Inspire Productive Teamwork. Rather, Weiss is smitten with the collegial Canadian wild goose who "flies alone in full command of its own wing power ... individually contributing to the flock's progress, while relying on the other geese to do their share." Geese are like successful business leaders in that they manage resources well, effectively motivate their troops, and apparently practice a primitive form of succession planning. Sadly, geese score lower on planning and "visioning." And the book makes no allusion to their core competency, which blankets lawns and golf courses everywhere.

H is for Hollywood
Hoo-ray for: an information-intensive industry whose evolution into a project-based structure presaged the emergence of our technology-reliant networked economy. Dah dah dah dah dah dah dah...Hollywood! Tinseltown, historically ruled by all-powerful studios, has morphed into an amalgam of "loose, temporary project groups that draw from a central talent pool," explain Mark London Williams and Steve Barth in Knowledge Management magazine. That model -- in which intellectual capital (the acting talent of Ben Affleck, say) bounces from knowledge-based project to knowledge-based project ( Pearl Harbor to Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back) -- is de rigueur in companies that rely on outsourcing and independent contractors. "Hollywood's network economy isn't unique," explain Joel Kotkin and David Friedman in a 1995 article for Inc. "Eventually every knowledge-intensive industry will end up in the same flattened, atomized state." As one executive whose function was outsourced put it, "It's only the companies that got small."

I is for improvisational theater
All Sun Microsystems is a stage, and all its entrepreneurial leaders and flexible product groups merely players. So suggests Rosabeth Moss Kanter in Evolve! Succeeding in the Digital Culture of Tomorrow. "The drama of management was once like traditional theater," writes Kanter, who blasts both for their reluctance to innovate. On the other hand, the companies best positioned to make hay of the Web operate like "improvisational theater," the author notes. "A general theme is identified to get the actors started. Then the actors try out different moves, develop the story as they interact with the audience, and create a better experience with each round." Too bad so many audience members shouted suggestions like "online advertising" and "premium-tier services."

J is for jazz
In John Kao's Jamming: The Art and Discipline of Business Creativity, Charlie Parker is the essence of a talented innovator, and bebop is the killer app. Jam sessions are the perfect metaphor for creativity management, Kao believes, because in "today's global marketplace -- turbulent, 'spacey,' and endlessly demanding of the new, the experimental, the faster, the better, and the cheaper -- there's no time for business managers to look for solutions in the archives of corporate sheet music." OK, organizations do need some sheet music -- in the form of budgets, agendas, and the like -- but they also need the freedom to improvise, to innovate, to feed and channel inspiration. Jazz artists walk the line in music that managers walk in business: "to locate the ever-mobile sweet spot somewhere between systems and analysis on the one hand and the free-flowing creativity of the individual on the other," writes Kao. Take five.

K is for kiddie stories
In his classic book, The Uses of Enchantment, Bruno Bettelheim revealed the psychological and existential truths that animate classic fairy tales. But a mine of management principles also lies beneath all those happily-ever-afters. In Goldilocks on Management: 27 Revisionist Fairy Tales for Serious Managers, Gloria Gilbert Mayer and Thomas Mayer translate what are essentially Aesopian morals into basic business sense. So, for example, Little Red Riding Hood demonstrates that competitors will take advantage of inexperience. The Pied Piper teaches us that consultants should be carefully managed. The Bremen Town Musicians is about the importance of functional teams. And The Emperor's New Clothes proves that the only reliable sources of accurate information are individuals without a vested interest. Like, say, the authors of business books.

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Leigh Buchanan

Leigh Buchanan is an editor at large for Inc. Magazine. A former editor at Harvard Business Review and founding editor of WebMaster magazine, she writes regular columns on leadership and workplace culture, and she contributes Inc.'s capsule book reviews, "A Skimmer's Guide to the Latest Business Books."

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