Book description
The economic crisis was not just caused by a failure of regulation or
economic policy; it was a story of the failure of management in
a fundamental sense-a deeply flawed approach to management that
encouraged bankers to pursue opportunities without regard for their
long-term consequences, and to put their own interests ahead of those
of their employers and their shareholders.
The revised edition of this best-selling book shows convincingly that
many of today's major economic problems in the west can be traced to a
failure of management. In this updated edition the author draws our
attention to new examples of failed management, from Rupert Murdoch's
News Corp, and the disaster at BP, to the ongoing problems in
financial services companies such as UBS and RBS. Throughout the book
the references and statistics have been updated, to make this a
current, highly relevant analysis of the problems besetting modern
business and how managers need to tackle them.
Julian Birkinshaw
is Professor and Chair of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at the London
Business School. He has PhD and MBA degrees in Business from the Richard
Ivey School of Business, University of Western Ontario, and a BSc (Hons)
from the University of Durham. He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by
the Stockholm School of Economics, 2009.
Professor Birkinshaw's main area of expertise is in the strategy and
management of large multinational corporations, and on such specific
issues as corporate entrepreneurship, innovation,
subsidiary-headquarters relationship, knowledge management, network
organizations, and global customer management. He is the author of ten
other books, including
Giant Steps in Management
(2007),
Inventuring: Why Big Companies Must Think Small
(2003),
Leadership the Sven-Goran Eriksson Way
(2002) and
Entrepreneurship in the Global Firm
(2001), and over seventy articles in such journals as
Harvard
Business Review
,
Sloan Management Review
,
Strategy Management Journal
and
Academy of Management Journal
. He is active as a consultant and executive educator to many large
companies, including Rio Tinto, SAP, GSK, ABB, Ericsson, Kone, Petrofac,
WPP, Bombardier, Sara Lee, HSBC, Akzo Nobel, Roche, Thyssen Krupp, UBS,
PWC, Coloplast, BBC, Unilever and Novo Nordisk.
In 1998 the leading British Management magazine
Management Today
profiled Professor Birkinshaw as one of six of the “Next Generation of
Management Gurus”. He is regularly quoted in international media
outlets, including CNN, BBC,
The Economist
, the
Wall Street Journal
, and
The Times
. He speaks regularly at business conferences in the UK, Europe, North
America and Australia.
Professor Birkinshaw is co-founder with best-selling author Gary Hamel
of the Management Innovation Lab (MLab), a unique partnership between
academia and business that is seeking to accelerate the evolution of
management.
