Bookcase: What would Drucker do now?
(December 2011)
• By Rick Wartzman • McGrawHill • RRP $44.99 At its core, management “deals with people, their values, their growth and development – and this makes it a humanity,” Peter Drucker, the greatest management guru of them all, once wrote. He continued: “So does its [management’s] concern with, and impact on, social structure and community.” Management, he concluded, is “deeply involved in moral concerns – the nature of man, good and evil”. Prompts and insights like these, pepper this delightfully useful book. Rick Wartzman, like Drucker, is a writer.
Bookcase: Blueprint To A Billion: 7 Essentials to Achieve Exponential Growth
(November 2011) • 7 Essentials to Achieve Exponential Growth • By David G Thomson • Wiley • RRP $46.99
How to get New Zealand companies to grow is an age-old conundrum for our politicians and economic advisors. Our business leaders are equally baffled by how to achieve it, with just one or two notable exceptions – Fonterra being one of them.
Bookcase: Thesis Survivor Stories: Practical advice on getting through your PhD or Masters thesis
(November 2011) • By Marilyn Waring and Kate Kearins • AUT Media • RRP $39.99
If you have ever dreamed of “going back and doing a doctorate” this just may be the book for you.
Bookcase: The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling
(October 2011) • By Stephen Denning • Josey Bass • RRP $31.77
There is noting quite so compelling, enervating or informative as a cracking good yarn, well told. And even when the subject is business narrative, this conclusion holds true according to American writer and consultant Stephen Denning. His hypothesis is not one with which I feel inclined to disagree. Denning first published The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling in 2005.
Bookcase: What to ask the person in the mirror
(October 2011) • By Robert Steven Kaplan • McGraw Hill • RRP $59.00
A successful life in leadership swings more on knowing the questions to ask, rather than on having the answers to hand. The premise of Robert S Kaplan’s new book, What to ask the person in the mirror, is that knowing how and when to ask critical questions serves young professionals and senior leaders equally well when it comes to taking greater ownership of their career.
Groundswell: Winning in a world transformed by social technologies
(September 2011) •By: Charlene Li & Josh Bernoff •Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press •RRP: $35.00
Getting baby boomers’ heads around both the applications and implications of social media and its facilitating technologies isn’t easy. I know because I am one of them. My personal salvation arrived, in large measure anyhow, with the latest and expanded edition of Groundswell, a book by a couple of American researchers who work in this space.
The Leading-Edge Manager’s Guide to Success
(September 2011) •By David Parmenter •Publisher: Wiley •RRP: $78.99
New Zealand is not over-endowed with management thinkers and writers. For that reason alone, it’s good to watch a home-grown author in this genre making it on the world writers’ and speakers’ circuit. David Parmenter submitted his first article on key performance indicators to this magazine around 20 years ago. We accepted it, edited it and gave it the headline: Killer KPIs.
• 7 Essentials to Achieve Exponential Growth 
• By Marilyn Waring and Kate Kearins 
• By Stephen Denning 
• By Robert Steven Kaplan .jpg)
•By: Charlene Li & Josh Bernoff .jpg)
•By David Parmenter 
