Hard-core Management

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Highly Recommended! - Rated
This blunt, irreverent book blurts out what many people in business have long suspected: nearly everything you learned in business school is wrong and most of what you read in corporate mission statements and strategic plans makes no sense. Author Jo Owen takes on all of the shibboleths of yesteryear's management literature - romance your customer, communicate, invite change and so on - and demolishes each one. The approach is raw and blatant; it stands in relation to ordinary business books much as punk rock stands in relation to easy listening. The author seems to be saying something no one else has dared to say. But do not confuse the novelty of the presentation with the novelty of the material itself. To some extent, Owen's recommendations revise the conventional wisdom of the recent bubble years and replace it with a new and - if not more sober - certainly less effervescent orthodoxy. We recommend taking a thoughtful look. What people are starting to say more and more often, Jo Owen has perhaps expressed with the most originality.

Post modern management manual - Rated
This is a great read.

However there were moments when Owen's observations made me feel like throwing in my management towel. As he points out, most of us operate in a deluded state of believing that we know where we are going and how we are getting there.

Today that belief doesn’t seem to be getting us very far. Owen's solutions are brilliant in their simplicity and conviction: listening, reading and seeing in order to understand rather than show off...searching for the local as opposed to universal truth....

As he says, we are prisoners of the past and prisoners of our ignorance. For instance we pretend to understand technology on the basis of being able to operate mobile phones and laptops – but in reality few of us know much and, rather than admit that, we skate over technical decisions which are key to our companies’ futures.

The need for clarity and simplicity is another central message of Owen’s book which is delivered in a clear and amusing style. It should be read by anyone serious about breaking through the hackneyed jargon of business management and towards an entirely new approach. Out of all the management books I have read it is the only once that comes up with a convincing model for leadership and success in the twenty first century.

Joseph Cohen