The Witch Doctors: Making Sense of the Management Gurus [Paperback]

John Micklethwait (Author), Adrian Wooldridge (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 27, 1998

The Witch Doctors is a one-stop guide to management theories, fads, and the gurus who promote them that will spark controversy, debate, and a dialogue for change. Funny, entertaining and outspoken, this is a book no American worker can afford to miss.


From the Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Management theory is a worldwide growth industry these days. Terrified of falling behind, business executives flock from one management guru to another in search of a competitive edge. Catchwords such as "chaos," "excellence," and "quality" echo in corporate halls and bounce around boardrooms the world over. Which ideas and theories are sound, and which are ultimately useless fads? John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge spent two years answering this question. Their resulting book, The Witch Doctors, separates the management wheat from the chaff. In mercifully jargon-free prose, they look at the promise and problems of what's driving the current management industry explosion. Starting with Peter Drucker and Tom Peters, the authors examine the major ideas and their proponents, focusing not only on corporate implications but on social consequences as well. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

In a skeptical, entertaining, iconoclastic audit of the management-guru industry, Economist editors Micklethwait and Wooldridge focus primarily on pundits such as Peter Drucker, Tom Peters, James Champy and Michael Hammer, but also puncture the management-theory hype emanating from consultancies and business schools. Much of the advice dispensed by these sources, the authors argue, is faddish, riddled with contradictions and jargon, based on simplistic formulas, no more reliable than tribal witch doctors' medicine. They view the craze of reengineering (organizing a business around processes rather than departments) as, too often, a pretext for downsizing. Along with giving an analysis of Japan's hybrid, flexible managerial practices, they identify the phenomenally successful network of family businesses created by the overseas Chinese as an alternative model for business growth. Micklethwait and Wooldridge have built their fair-minded, balanced critique around hotly debated issues in modern management?a company's optimal size, harnessing knowledge as a resource, leaders' accountability, strategic planning, globalization?making this a useful, thoughtful tool for managers in large or small firms.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Three Rivers Press (January 27, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0812929888
• ISBN-13: 978-0812929881
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (38 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,110,016 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The best summary on management theory there is, January 6, 2004

By 

piethein coebergh (amsterdam, Netherlands) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Witch Doctors: What Management Gurus Are Saying, Why It Matters and How to Make Sense of It (Paperback)

Great fun, great wit, great journalism. These guys started off as outsiders but they clearly are top-class journalists: they truly captured all the "strengths, weaknesses, opportunities & threats" that all the true, semi or fake gurus have produced since Taylor, Sloan and Drucker. A must have!

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Warms the cockles of this management consulting cynic., February 28, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: The Witch Doctors (Hardcover)

For those workers in the trenches who have recently found themselves downsized due to the latest round of "re-engineering,".....

For those frustrated managers who have had just one too many management consultants imposed upon them by paranoid executives.......

For those paranoid executives who feel they need to hire the "latest and greatest" consultants to stay ahead of the competition.......

.....You must read this book.

Written by two staff editors of the economist, this book reveals the charlatanism surrounding the management consultant industry, and how the growth of the industry has led to the imposition of new management techniques which may be entirely irrelevant to the enterprise, its workers, and the shareholders. The prose is what you would expect from The Economist - pragmatic, and easy to read.

The conclusions are straightforward and hard to ignore.

As one of the senior Editors at The Economist warned the authors while they were writing the book: "You know what worries me about your book about management theory: that you'll talk to all the people and read all the books; that you will detail all its incredible effects - the number of jobs lost, the billions of dollars spent, and so on. And you won't say the obvious thing: that it's 99 percent bullshit. And everybody knows that" (from the prologue).

Indeed, if everybody read this book, his statement would ring true

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The best management book ive read, July 26, 2002

By 

Bharath Patil "deeptull" (Palo Alto, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Witch Doctors (Hardcover)

Would recommend this book strongly to two sets of people:
1. All those who feel they do not read enough about management
2. My B-school strategy professors that tried to treat books by gurus as bibles

After working in companies that have consistently outperformed the market, my conclusion is that good managements are those that have the ability to learn about the environment all by their own and have the knack to apply it well bt themselves. No consultant or management guru can ever know a company's business better than its employees do. The best the gurus can ever do is mouth generalities. All of management theory is ephemral, transient. It is good to know concepts and use them sparingly and caringly.

This book validates what ive been feeling for a long time.