03/05/90 A CLASSIC BUSINESS BOOKSHELF

A CLASSIC BUSINESS BOOKSHELF

March 5, 1990

Business books keep getting hotter. A trio of them currently crowds the top of The New York Times best-seller list. Bookstore shelves are groaning under a proliferation of business titles, ranging from tales from the front line to advice on winning a corner office. This month will even see the launch of--would you believe?--Business Books and Audio Review, devoted exclusively to books and tapes on the subject.
Unfortunately, the majority of new business titles are dreadful throwaways containing a handful of disposable ideas. So the busy executive is left in a quandary. Are there business books that should be read? Which ones are they? BUSINESS WEEK surveyed the literature of management to come up with a bookshelf of indispensable reading--a sort of core curriculum of management literacy. You might not tuck these 10 titles in your bag for a trip to a desert island. Still, they all entertain, as well as lend perspective and guidance.
The list encompasses autobiography, journalism, futurism, and advice. But you won't find any fiction here. Such classics as Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, however exemplary as literature, are dreary portraits of greed and opportunism. And several well-known management books, notably William H. Whyte Jr.'s The Organization Man and Chester I. Barnard's deadly Functions of the Executive, have little meaning today. Similarly, people still refer to ``Taylorism,'' but no one reads Frederick W. Taylor, the ``father of scientific management,'' because his writings have largely become irrelevant.
All the books chosen are intended to provide advice and direction for people who run companies. Even the titles that are primarily of historical interest hold lessons for today. With the exception of Peter F. Drucker's Adventures of a Bystander, all are still in print in hardcover or paperback.
-- My Years with General Motors by Alfred P. Sloan Jr.; Doubleday & Co.; 1963. This classic memoir by the most famous professional manager in American business history was perhaps the first CEO autobiography of any consequence. It bears little resemblance to the gossipy, behind-the-scenes tales that now dominate the genre. Sloan's book focuses on the business decisions, structure, and policies that allowed GM to become the largest industrial complex in the world. Noting the extremely impersonal quality of Sloan's story, management savant Peter Drucker has called this ``perhaps the most interesting, most revealing, but also the most frustrating book on business ever written by a businessman.''
-- On a Clear Day You Can See General Motors by J. Patrick Wright; Wright Enterprises; 1979. Here's John Z. DeLorean's devastating chronicle of life inside the automotive giant as related by Wright, who once headed BW's Detroit bureau. Pair it with Sloan, and you have a literary duel of perspectives on GM. Wright's book is a timeless examination of what happens when a large organization gets hardening of the arteries, especially the impact on managers and employees. It's vastly superior to the superficial Iacocca, which provides so little insight into business and decision-making that it hardly qualifies as a business book.
-- The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder; Little, Brown & Co.; 1981. Kidder won a Pulitzer prize for this tale of the creation of a computer at Data General Corp. Few authors have managed to capture the exhilaration and frustration involved in the birth of a business product. Kidder's treatment of this people-intensive process and the entrepreneurial culture that revolves around it is unrivaled.
-- Indecent Exposure by David McClintick; William Morrow & Co.; 1982. While Kidder's Soul brings you much of the unrestrained joy of business, this expose of the sordid battle for control of Columbia Pictures provides a fascinating glimpse of business' dark side. It's one of the best-reported and best-written business adventures ever published.
-- In Search of Excellence by Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman Jr.; Harper & Row; 1982. Hailed for its clarity, derided for its simplicity, this is at once the most overrated and the most underrated management book of all time. It can't be ignored because of its phenomenal impact and its own excellence. Sure, some of the companies the authors praised later faltered. Still, you'd be hard-pressed to find a better primer on the evolution and practice of management. Just don't get too carried away with those eight precepts of excellence. There is more to good performance than that.
-- Competitive Advantage by Michael E. Porter; Free Press; 1985. Porter's model of the ``value chain'' has become one of the bag of tools every MBA should graduate with. Essentially, Porter offers a way to add value to your products by analyzing and learning from your competition. Management consultants have made millions by applying the author's competitive logic to one company after another.
-- Adventures of a Bystander by Peter F. Drucker; Harper & Row; 1978. Drucker's Management: Tasks, Practices, Responsibilities has become as important to a generation of U. S. managers as Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care was for a generation (or more) of parents. Both produced a lot of spoiled children. Adventures of a Bystander, Drucker's freewheeling self-portrait, provides entertaining and insightful observations about business and political figures and lively anecdotes about Drucker's life and work as a management philosopher and consultant. If you were going to have dinner with Drucker, you'd want to sit and chat with the charming, provocative raconteur who wrote Adventures, not the author of Management.
-- Profiles of the Future by Arthur C. Clarke; Holt, Rinehart & Winston; 1962. This is one of banker Walter B. Wriston's favorite books, and with good reason. In Profiles, Clarke--best known for his sci-fi masterpieces--explores how science will change the way we live and work. The book forces executives to change their thinking, applying the logic of science to the world of business. Clarke's entertaining ruminations hold up remarkably well--and lend support to those business idealists who still dream.
-- The Third Wave by Alvin Toffler; William Morrow; 1980. If Sloan offers a dated, though historically important, view of the U.S. corporation, Toffler's vision is imperishably fresh. His earlier Future Shock is better known, but The Third Wave is broader in scope and more forward-looking. As Toffler views history, the first wave was launched by the agricultural revolution; the second, by the industrial revolution. We're still struggling through the third--marked by the information explosion, the demise of the nuclear family, and more--which is why this book is still an indispensable road map for the present and the future.
-- Berkshire Hathaway Annual Reports. Forget Graham and Dodd's classic Security Analysis. If you believe your job as a manager is to create value, you'll have more fun hearing it from Warren E. Buffett, the world's most famous investor and a Graham and Dodd devotee. Buffett's pithy annual reports are packed with more interesting prose and commonsense advice on management and markets than any single book you're likely to find in a mall bookstore.

JOHN A. BYRNE