The Management Gurus: Lessons from the Best Management Books of All Time »

Chris Lauer is a senior editor at Soundview Executive Book Summaries, a subscription service that summarizes the best, most influential business books every month.

Insightful summaries of fifteen outstanding management books

Since 1978, Soundview Executive Book Summaries has offered its subscribers condensed versions of the most relevant and influential business books published each year. The company has won acclaim as the definitive selection service for business book readers.

Following its successful first collection, The Marketing Gurus, Soundview has now compiled The Management Gurus, which includes summaries of fifteen management classics. One of them is a previously unpublished summary: Jack Welch and the 4 E's of Leadership. Other featured books include:

• Winning with People by John Maxwell
• Judgment by Noel Tichy and Warren Bennis
• Managing Crises Before They Happen by Ian I. Mitroff

These summaries distill thousands of pages about leadership, strategy, crisis management, organizational behavior, and more—perfect for busy executives and students.

Brian Walton - Library Journal

Soundview publishes condensed versions of selected notable business books and sends them out to subscribers. This collection of some of its summaries follows The Marketing Gurus collection. Lauer, a senior editor at Soundview, joins with other Soundview staff to offer 14 summarized works on management by recent prominent writers in the field. Each summary is a distillation of approximately 5000 words. The summaries, all of recent books or updated editions, making them relatively fresh in a fluid field, cover a range of current topics (e.g., topgrading and wikinomics) and are by lead authors (e.g., Ken Blanchard, Peter Drucker), but there's little structure and few connections between the offerings. Each summary is preceded by a "summary in brief," spelling out in four paragraphs what will be covered in the full summary, adding an irritating layer of repetition. The summaries are competently done and might be useful as refreshers, but reading boiled-down versions of even the most potent ideas is, at best, uninteresting, making one feel like a student taking shortcuts. This book never makes a real case for its own existence: it does not analyze the books covered or build upon their arguments. Libraries would be better served by acquiring the original books instead.