Title: The Next Big Idea
Author: Carol Kennedy
Publisher: Random House Business Books, London
Format: Hardback, 266 pages
Price: £17.99
ISBN: 0712684441

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For reasons that escape me, the most profitable retail outlets at large airports are, apparently, shoe shops. Properly shod, the traveller can then proceed to the bookshop where the latest management guides are always on prominent display. Carol Kennedy has made something of a name for herself in the last few years by providing a series of I-Spy books on management theories, of which Guide to the Management Gurus is probably the most well known. Rather than exceeding her hand luggage allowance by buying the collected works of Tom Peters, Charles Handy, Richard Pascale et al, the up and coming manager can get the gist of what they have to say from one book. Or rather, two – this new book The Next Big Idea, as the name implies, hazards a few guesses to what’s coming next.

The first few chapters present an overview of management theories from Taylor onwards, tracing the development of a genre that started with the work of engineers and other practitioners with real shop-floor experience such as Taylor himself, Herzberg and Maslow. During the middle of the last century, academics began to take over (Charles Handy, Michael Porter, Rosabeth Moss Kanter), and more recently, an increasing quantity of the literature has come from specialist management consultancy houses. Peters and Waterman’s In Search of Excellence, which grew out of their work with McKinsey’s is undoubtedly the most widely known and influential of these.

Kennedy traces the rise and fall of various ideas which sought to encapsulate the essence of good management – terms such as business process re-engineering, or total quality management, which have probably now had their day. She devotes a considerable amount of space to recent more biological theories of the organisation and its management, concentrating in particular on the work of Ricard Pascale (who suggests (in Surfing the Edge of Chaos) that ‘equilibrium is the precursor to death’) and Daniel Coleman, whose theories of emotional and spiritual intelligence suggest the kinds of new skills that managers need for the new century.

Inevitably, the last half of the book concentrates on the influence of the internet, and the need to manage at net speed. She looks at some of the more longlasting and successful companies of the new economy – Hewlett Packard for example, which started in a garage and is now trying to recapture that spirit to manage a multinational company. She interviews John Seeley Brown of Xerox at some length. She provides a useful summary of key books that attempt to explain the impact of the internet on the economy by practitioners (Gates and Dell), technical gurus (Negroponte and Dyson), social scientists (Castells) and the man who probably did more than any other to get us where we are today, Tim Berners-Lee.

What is the next big idea? Well, you really have to read the whole book to find out, but it’s not giving too much away to say that it will probably emerge from combination of small is beautiful, emotional intelligence and the stakeholder economy. Together they will create ‘a warm pool for the fish to swim in‘! Overall, apart from a few unfortunate references to Enron as a company to look up to, this is a good book – but wait until it comes out in paperback, and your next medium haul plane journey.

David Evans
E-Learning Consultant
Financial Projections Ltd